6 ms·

I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country. They're still debating a quarantine for new

I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country. They're still debating a quarantine for new arrivals, contact tracing is yet to really start, testing lagged significantly... It's an island nation, it should have had a head-and-shoulders advantage over continental Europe with full potential for an outcome closer to New Zealand or Australia rather than the US or Brazil. What went wrong?

toyg 6y ago
> What went wrong? A government was elected to "get Brexit done", despite being patently (and provably) hopeless at everything else. Then "Everything else" suddenly became really important, and here we are.
- rezeroed 6y ago
  No, it's because they don't really want all this fuss; forced hand. They're trying to get away with as little as possible - Sweden, but without looking like the Swedish approach because the left will scream.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    I think they were right about the screaming bit. Here in North America, we're doing alright. Canada got relatively lucky, timing the restrictions before the peak unlike so many other places. The U.S. overall rates of COVID death are dramatically lower than the UK and Sweden, and people still frame it like the President is a bloody-handed murderer who gets off on watching people suffer. Mexico made a big stink about things, and some politicians there even turned their noses up at the U.S. (still the country most likely to render aid) during its peak, but are going into a mass outbreak of their own, that is on a steady trajectory to kill as many or more than the U.S. one.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      What figures are you using for all cause mortality for the US?
    - ben_w 6y ago
      USA: ~120k deaths, 3.7e-4/capita Mexico: ~20k deaths, 1.55e-4/capita Sure, the future could be anything, but on the basis of the current evidence that you’re living in a glasshouse, I really don’t think USA Republicans should be casting stones any time soon.
      - microcolonel 6y ago
        Mexico's outbreak started later, like Brazil's; probably because they have generally less commerce and travel in general. Mexico's rate of death is still growing rapidly. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?time=2020-02-26..&country=BRA~CAN~ITA~KOR~SWE~TWN~GBR~USA~MEX https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...
    - Voloskaya 6y ago
      > Canada got relatively lucky, timing the restrictions before the peak unlike so many other places. That's not luck, it's called competence. > U.S. overall rates of COVID death are dramatically lower than the UK and Sweden Is 10% less than the 2 worst european countries really worth applauding? Also 10% isn't dramatic in my book. Average US death rate for the last 7 days is still 5 times higher than France for example. [Edit: this is bad metric, see comments below, my bad.] > people still frame it like the President is a bloody-handed murderer who gets off on watching people suffer. He willingly took decisions that clearly, scientifically cost the lives of many people to win some political points with his base. You can't possibly think that the crisis was handled completly optimally with the infos available at the time, and no other handling could have saved any more lives.
      - microcolonel 6y ago
        > That's not luck, it's called competence. Our outbreak started later, and so did most countermeasures, for reasons that appear to be complete coincidence. > Is 10% less than the 2 worst european countries really worth applauding? Also 10% isn't dramatic in my book. Well, I could've compared Spain and Italy as well. Spain's outcomes seem like they may have a lot to do with vitamin D. > US death rate is still 5 times higher than France for example. Right now the rolling-average daily rate is about 3.8x higher in the U.S. than it is in France (which has been in a lockdown of a sort that would probably be illegal in the U.S.); but that's after ignoring the massive spike in France, almost a flat month of death rates more than 2x the U.S. peak (which didn't last as long). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?time=2020-02-26..&country=FRA~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi... > He willingly took decisions that clearly, scientifically cost the lives of many people to win some political points with his base. Such as what? The President is not a dictator, he does not get to make most of the major decisions involved in an outbreak like this. Thanks to everyone scrambling to make things work, it seems that the standard of care was never significantly impacted by a lack of supplies, and none of the hospitals in the hotspot exceeded capacity. Furthermore, the states that most resembled the White House's recommendations have had better outcomes across the board. > You can't possibly think that the crisis was handled completly optimally with the infos available at the time, and no other handling could have saved any more lives. That is a completely unrelated claim, that nobody is making. Hindsight is always 20-20. I think that it would have been politically infeasible to do what Taiwan did for all of North America.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    >it's because they don't really want all this fuss; forced hand What does this even mean? "No, they aren't hopeless, they just don't want this challenging situation to exist, so naturally they won't handle it well. You can't blame them for that!"
    - rezeroed 6y ago
      It means their priorities weren't the same as yours, and so they opted for middle ground.
      - ubercow13 6y ago
        We've had all of the disruption to the economy that Sweden might have avoided, none of the freedoms they have retained, and yet still one of the worst death rates in the world. It's not clear to me what 'fuss' they have avoided.
- gadders 6y ago
  Compared the alternative offered (Corbyn), they are a model of efficiency and competency.
youngNed 6y ago
honestly, the british governments response can (as is often the case) be summed up by this clip (18sec) from yes Minister (the 4 stages) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6BW-mvkRjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6BW-mvkRjE
swiley 6y ago
> a modern first world democracy I mean, they try. Compared to the US government the UK government doesn’t feel architected in any way, it’s just entirely wacky tradition. The House of Lords is totally bizarre for example and that makes me question both the “modern” and “democracy” part. Then again we have the parts of the USG responsible for the CFR (as opposed to the US code which comes from the democratic part) which is kind of the same thing (I can’t remember what they’re called off the top of my head.)
- threatofrain 6y ago
  The US government is under specified in many ways and where things are legally gray people often depend on traditions and norms to provide moral and institutional efficacy.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- toyg 6y ago
  The UK Parliament is the mother of modern representative democracy, but it's so old that it now looks a bit like your grand-grandma: on a wheelchair, muttering incoherently most of the time, and struggling to understand anything in the conversation.
Accacin 6y ago
Government. In my opinion they're so obsessed with showing how we don't need the EU we decide to go 180 with any decisions made in Europe. Personally, most of my friends and I decided to quarantine a few weeks before the government decided to ask people to do so. I disagree about the contract tracing app though, I'm glad for any reason that it's delayed.
- andrewnicolalde 6y ago
  What issue do you have with the contact tracing application now that it’s switching to the Apple-Google model?
- noir_lord 6y ago
  There is also the fact that people are been forced back into open offices as we speak. There is no earthly reason I can't do my job from home (already have everything set-up from way before covid) but they want people back in the office...to have all meetings done at desk via videochat. I pushed hard but they are not moving..which is why I will be as soon as I get a remote offer at comparable or better salary, started looking immediately after the last call where I got a hard no. Government advice is "Should work from home if able to" but it's advice, not mandatory nor binding and there is no protection/law behind it - so pretty much nothing I can do other than quit, I've savings to get me through a year out of work but I don't want to deplete those in the middle of a pandemic when no one knows what the outcome of all this and a possible recurrence will be - so like a lot of people I'm having to balance the economic risk vs the real health risk about whether to go back or not. My bosses bosses irrational hatred of WFH is going to put a lot of people at risk. We are so fucked.
adwww 6y ago
The cabinet was picked entirely for their blind loyalty to brexit, rather than any competance. They can barely collectively tie their own shoes, yet suddenly they are responsible for managing the biggest peacetime crisis in our history.
drumhead 6y ago
They wanted herd immunity, but they couldn’t do it during flu season, so they went for flattening the curve which they succeeded with. Now flu seasons over they’ve got the capacity to deal with a surge in cases so they’re easing lockdown, they want to create a massive measles party for the summer, so by the time flu season starts again they won’t have to worry too much about another lockdown. Remember the worst case scenario was 500,000 to 1 million deaths. They got away with 40,000
- DanBC 6y ago
  > so they went for flattening the curve which they succeeded with We cancelled a bunch of routine treatment and surgery in order to provide surge capacity. We converted existing wards into new ICUs. We had to take unqualified student nurses and convert them to temporary nurses[1], we took doctors from their specialities and got them to cover other work. Finally, we stopped admitting certain groups of people to hospital altogether. Look at the death rate in care homes. > They got away with 40,000 That number is for people who died after having a positive test. Many people are not being tested, so there are many deaths of people not included in that figure. At the moment we think the true number is at least 50% higher, so the real number is 60,000. And there are different ways to count death. If the UK used the same method to count covid-19 deaths as it does to count flu deaths we'd see over 100,000 deaths. [1] ...and we said we'd pay them, but now they've finished a lot of them are finding that they're not going to be paid.
  - nicky0 6y ago
    Actually the 40000 also includes people who were never tested but showed symptoms similar to Covid.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      No, it doesn't. The 40,000 number is from this government website: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Total number of COVID-19 associated UK deaths 42,461 Deaths of people who have had a positive test result The 40,000 number only includes those who had a test, and were tested positive.
g_p 6y ago
The quarantine for new arrivals has been in effect for 10 days [1]. Contact tracing was launched on 28th May [2]. It seems to me that what went wrong was a large number of UK residents were overseas in February/March (sspecially on ski breaks) to Italy, France and other mainland Europe destinations. The Government didn't impose any emergency isolation or quarantine on those arriving, as was the case for those arriving on repatriation flights from Hubei and other Chinese destinations. Given much of the scientific analysis of the virus points to strains being descended from those in mainland Europe, it seems a key reason the UK wasn't "head and shoulders" ahead was the scale of this international leisure travel to countries that ended up most affected. Had those returning been put into quarantine, there might have been a very different outcome, but it's hard to say for sure. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52774854 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52774854 [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/893172/test_and_trace_bulletin_week_2_28_may_to_10_june.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- culturestate 6y ago
  > The quarantine for new arrivals has been in effect for 10 days Given how effective arrival quarantines have been elsewhere (TW, NZ, SG, et al) and how long they’ve been in effect it’s frankly insane that the UK took this long to implement it.
  - g_p 6y ago
    I agree entirely here. In fact I know people at the time jumping up and down and saying "apply the Wuhan quarantine rules to everyone arriving from mainland Europe in general, or indeed anywhere". The key to me seems to have been that measures were put in place slowly, at the pace ministers move at, rather than the pace experts can make decisions at. Asking everyone who returned to quarantine for 7 days would clearly have helped, with the benefit of hindsight. I think the issue is that politicians tend to want to avoid imposing what are seen as invasive measures where they feel the risk is low. Their assessment of the level of risk posed by those returning from overseas holidays in February was clearly now, in the cold light of day, very poor. The sheer number of people overseas at the time probably didn't help matters - some suggestions that as many as 1 million people were overseas at the time [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/uk-battling-to-repatriate-hundreds-of-thousands-of-britons-says-dominic-raab-coronavrus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/uk-battling-to...
mantap 6y ago
It's a case of "plans are worthless but planning is essential". After the 2009 swine flu, the UK planned heavily for pandemic influenza, stockpiled millions of doses of tamiflu, etc. When the coronavirus came, instead of making a new plan for coronavirus they decided to just stick to the influenza plan, based on the reasoning that all pandemics are the same. Only, the two diseases are very different and by the time they realised that an influenza playbook wasn't going to cut it, it was way too late.
- lambdadmitry 6y ago
  I'm not sure where that narrative comes from. I certainly haven't seen any evidence for British response blindly following an influenza playbook. The closest I've seen was journalists speculating on twitter, but that's not an evidence. Neither is the fact that the UK was preparing for an influenza pandemic.
  - mantap 6y ago
    It comes from comparing the contents of the pandemic influenza planning documents to the actions of the government in the covid-19 crisis and noting the eerie similarity.
    - lambdadmitry 6y ago
      Correlation is not causation is all I can say.
ppf 6y ago
I think recent news is showing that a practical implementation of New Zealand's approach is not sufficient to acheive the required containment goal.
joshvm 6y ago
On the island bit - the travel situation is quite different to NZ. We have a lot more traffic for business, multiple busy airports, a rail link to the Schengen area and cheap access to international travel. We probably had a lot more routes for the virus to get in, and I think the assumption now is that it was circulating since the winter (although most of the news websites I can find are screaming tabloids). Politically, locking down borders was not palatable to the government - I don't think we ever closed the border actually, we just made it very impractical for people to travel. Someone was actually able to get to Paris for a haircut a month or so ago. https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/18/locked-down-brits-in-need-of-a-haircut-can-just-get-one-in-paris https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/18/locked-down-brits-in-nee...
tomatocracy 6y ago
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that policy in relation to care homes is likely to have been a factor which made things significantly worse in the UK. Patients were deliberately moved out of hospitals into care homes without tests for SARS-CoV-2 infection, in order to free up hospital beds, and in so doing gave the virus to other residents of those homes. Our care home sector was also more vulnerable than most because it (a) consists of individual care homes which are relatively large and (b) is staffed in large part by agency staff who work in multiple homes. We're not the only country or region which made this mistake of course and this wasn't the only mistake made but the surprising thing is how long it took for the government to recognise and correct this. Part of that is probably human nature ("we have a plan, stick to the plan"), but I suspect part of it is old-fashioned civil service incompetence too (the same incompetence which led to this being the plan to start with).
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
>I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country. They're not. What version of "every country" do you have in mind? Most other countries also failed at contact tracing early on. The only country in Europe that had and used effective contact tracing was Germany. Almost everywhere else it has made little or not contribution. If you look at the epi curves then the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have had basically the same outbreak (France a little less). So there is no need to wonder why the UK is special because it isn't. There is plenty to say about which European countries responded well and which didn't and why even Germany's response was markedly inferior to countries like Vietnam but that has to start from a data driven perspective that doesn't pretend that the UK is particularly special.
unfunco 6y ago
I'm not disagreeing with the statement, we've done very poorly, but I feel comparisons to Australia, and especially NZ are way off, London is the city with the most air traffic globally and the virus was here much earlier than the point in time we were asked to stay at home, we might be a relatively small island nation but we're also one of the busiest.
tomcooks 6y ago
Pride is the first thing that comes to mind, it would also explain why they drive on the opposite side of the road, have a separate faucet for hot water, and so on and so forth. /s

toyg 6y ago

> What went wrong? A government was elected to "get Brexit done", despite being patently (and provably) hopeless at everything else. Then "Everything else" suddenly became really important, and here we are.

rezeroed 6y ago
No, it's because they don't really want all this fuss; forced hand. They're trying to get away with as little as possible - Sweden, but without looking like the Swedish approach because the left will scream.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- microcolonel 6y ago
  I think they were right about the screaming bit. Here in North America, we're doing alright. Canada got relatively lucky, timing the restrictions before the peak unlike so many other places. The U.S. overall rates of COVID death are dramatically lower than the UK and Sweden, and people still frame it like the President is a bloody-handed murderer who gets off on watching people suffer. Mexico made a big stink about things, and some politicians there even turned their noses up at the U.S. (still the country most likely to render aid) during its peak, but are going into a mass outbreak of their own, that is on a steady trajectory to kill as many or more than the U.S. one.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    What figures are you using for all cause mortality for the US?
  - ben_w 6y ago
    USA: ~120k deaths, 3.7e-4/capita Mexico: ~20k deaths, 1.55e-4/capita Sure, the future could be anything, but on the basis of the current evidence that you’re living in a glasshouse, I really don’t think USA Republicans should be casting stones any time soon.
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      Mexico's outbreak started later, like Brazil's; probably because they have generally less commerce and travel in general. Mexico's rate of death is still growing rapidly. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?time=2020-02-26..&country=BRA~CAN~ITA~KOR~SWE~TWN~GBR~USA~MEX https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...
  - Voloskaya 6y ago
    > Canada got relatively lucky, timing the restrictions before the peak unlike so many other places. That's not luck, it's called competence. > U.S. overall rates of COVID death are dramatically lower than the UK and Sweden Is 10% less than the 2 worst european countries really worth applauding? Also 10% isn't dramatic in my book. Average US death rate for the last 7 days is still 5 times higher than France for example. [Edit: this is bad metric, see comments below, my bad.] > people still frame it like the President is a bloody-handed murderer who gets off on watching people suffer. He willingly took decisions that clearly, scientifically cost the lives of many people to win some political points with his base. You can't possibly think that the crisis was handled completly optimally with the infos available at the time, and no other handling could have saved any more lives.
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      > That's not luck, it's called competence. Our outbreak started later, and so did most countermeasures, for reasons that appear to be complete coincidence. > Is 10% less than the 2 worst european countries really worth applauding? Also 10% isn't dramatic in my book. Well, I could've compared Spain and Italy as well. Spain's outcomes seem like they may have a lot to do with vitamin D. > US death rate is still 5 times higher than France for example. Right now the rolling-average daily rate is about 3.8x higher in the U.S. than it is in France (which has been in a lockdown of a sort that would probably be illegal in the U.S.); but that's after ignoring the massive spike in France, almost a flat month of death rates more than 2x the U.S. peak (which didn't last as long). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?time=2020-02-26..&country=FRA~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi... > He willingly took decisions that clearly, scientifically cost the lives of many people to win some political points with his base. Such as what? The President is not a dictator, he does not get to make most of the major decisions involved in an outbreak like this. Thanks to everyone scrambling to make things work, it seems that the standard of care was never significantly impacted by a lack of supplies, and none of the hospitals in the hotspot exceeded capacity. Furthermore, the states that most resembled the White House's recommendations have had better outcomes across the board. > You can't possibly think that the crisis was handled completly optimally with the infos available at the time, and no other handling could have saved any more lives. That is a completely unrelated claim, that nobody is making. Hindsight is always 20-20. I think that it would have been politically infeasible to do what Taiwan did for all of North America.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  >it's because they don't really want all this fuss; forced hand What does this even mean? "No, they aren't hopeless, they just don't want this challenging situation to exist, so naturally they won't handle it well. You can't blame them for that!"
  - rezeroed 6y ago
    It means their priorities weren't the same as yours, and so they opted for middle ground.
    - ubercow13 6y ago
      We've had all of the disruption to the economy that Sweden might have avoided, none of the freedoms they have retained, and yet still one of the worst death rates in the world. It's not clear to me what 'fuss' they have avoided.
gadders 6y ago
Compared the alternative offered (Corbyn), they are a model of efficiency and competency.

youngNed 6y ago

honestly, the british governments response can (as is often the case) be summed up by this clip (18sec) from yes Minister (the 4 stages) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6BW-mvkRjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6BW-mvkRjE

swiley 6y ago

> a modern first world democracy I mean, they try. Compared to the US government the UK government doesn’t feel architected in any way, it’s just entirely wacky tradition. The House of Lords is totally bizarre for example and that makes me question both the “modern” and “democracy” part. Then again we have the parts of the USG responsible for the CFR (as opposed to the US code which comes from the democratic part) which is kind of the same thing (I can’t remember what they’re called off the top of my head.)

threatofrain 6y ago
The US government is under specified in many ways and where things are legally gray people often depend on traditions and norms to provide moral and institutional efficacy.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
toyg 6y ago
The UK Parliament is the mother of modern representative democracy, but it's so old that it now looks a bit like your grand-grandma: on a wheelchair, muttering incoherently most of the time, and struggling to understand anything in the conversation.

Accacin 6y ago

Government. In my opinion they're so obsessed with showing how we don't need the EU we decide to go 180 with any decisions made in Europe. Personally, most of my friends and I decided to quarantine a few weeks before the government decided to ask people to do so. I disagree about the contract tracing app though, I'm glad for any reason that it's delayed.

andrewnicolalde 6y ago
What issue do you have with the contact tracing application now that it’s switching to the Apple-Google model?
noir_lord 6y ago
There is also the fact that people are been forced back into open offices as we speak. There is no earthly reason I can't do my job from home (already have everything set-up from way before covid) but they want people back in the office...to have all meetings done at desk via videochat. I pushed hard but they are not moving..which is why I will be as soon as I get a remote offer at comparable or better salary, started looking immediately after the last call where I got a hard no. Government advice is "Should work from home if able to" but it's advice, not mandatory nor binding and there is no protection/law behind it - so pretty much nothing I can do other than quit, I've savings to get me through a year out of work but I don't want to deplete those in the middle of a pandemic when no one knows what the outcome of all this and a possible recurrence will be - so like a lot of people I'm having to balance the economic risk vs the real health risk about whether to go back or not. My bosses bosses irrational hatred of WFH is going to put a lot of people at risk. We are so fucked.

adwww 6y ago

The cabinet was picked entirely for their blind loyalty to brexit, rather than any competance. They can barely collectively tie their own shoes, yet suddenly they are responsible for managing the biggest peacetime crisis in our history.

drumhead 6y ago

They wanted herd immunity, but they couldn’t do it during flu season, so they went for flattening the curve which they succeeded with. Now flu seasons over they’ve got the capacity to deal with a surge in cases so they’re easing lockdown, they want to create a massive measles party for the summer, so by the time flu season starts again they won’t have to worry too much about another lockdown. Remember the worst case scenario was 500,000 to 1 million deaths. They got away with 40,000

DanBC 6y ago
> so they went for flattening the curve which they succeeded with We cancelled a bunch of routine treatment and surgery in order to provide surge capacity. We converted existing wards into new ICUs. We had to take unqualified student nurses and convert them to temporary nurses[1], we took doctors from their specialities and got them to cover other work. Finally, we stopped admitting certain groups of people to hospital altogether. Look at the death rate in care homes. > They got away with 40,000 That number is for people who died after having a positive test. Many people are not being tested, so there are many deaths of people not included in that figure. At the moment we think the true number is at least 50% higher, so the real number is 60,000. And there are different ways to count death. If the UK used the same method to count covid-19 deaths as it does to count flu deaths we'd see over 100,000 deaths. [1] ...and we said we'd pay them, but now they've finished a lot of them are finding that they're not going to be paid.
- nicky0 6y ago
  Actually the 40000 also includes people who were never tested but showed symptoms similar to Covid.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    No, it doesn't. The 40,000 number is from this government website: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Total number of COVID-19 associated UK deaths 42,461 Deaths of people who have had a positive test result The 40,000 number only includes those who had a test, and were tested positive.

g_p 6y ago

The quarantine for new arrivals has been in effect for 10 days [1]. Contact tracing was launched on 28th May [2]. It seems to me that what went wrong was a large number of UK residents were overseas in February/March (sspecially on ski breaks) to Italy, France and other mainland Europe destinations. The Government didn't impose any emergency isolation or quarantine on those arriving, as was the case for those arriving on repatriation flights from Hubei and other Chinese destinations. Given much of the scientific analysis of the virus points to strains being descended from those in mainland Europe, it seems a key reason the UK wasn't "head and shoulders" ahead was the scale of this international leisure travel to countries that ended up most affected. Had those returning been put into quarantine, there might have been a very different outcome, but it's hard to say for sure. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52774854 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52774854 [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/893172/test_and_trace_bulletin_week_2_28_may_to_10_june.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

culturestate 6y ago
> The quarantine for new arrivals has been in effect for 10 days Given how effective arrival quarantines have been elsewhere (TW, NZ, SG, et al) and how long they’ve been in effect it’s frankly insane that the UK took this long to implement it.
- g_p 6y ago
  I agree entirely here. In fact I know people at the time jumping up and down and saying "apply the Wuhan quarantine rules to everyone arriving from mainland Europe in general, or indeed anywhere". The key to me seems to have been that measures were put in place slowly, at the pace ministers move at, rather than the pace experts can make decisions at. Asking everyone who returned to quarantine for 7 days would clearly have helped, with the benefit of hindsight. I think the issue is that politicians tend to want to avoid imposing what are seen as invasive measures where they feel the risk is low. Their assessment of the level of risk posed by those returning from overseas holidays in February was clearly now, in the cold light of day, very poor. The sheer number of people overseas at the time probably didn't help matters - some suggestions that as many as 1 million people were overseas at the time [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/uk-battling-to-repatriate-hundreds-of-thousands-of-britons-says-dominic-raab-coronavrus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/uk-battling-to...

mantap 6y ago

It's a case of "plans are worthless but planning is essential". After the 2009 swine flu, the UK planned heavily for pandemic influenza, stockpiled millions of doses of tamiflu, etc. When the coronavirus came, instead of making a new plan for coronavirus they decided to just stick to the influenza plan, based on the reasoning that all pandemics are the same. Only, the two diseases are very different and by the time they realised that an influenza playbook wasn't going to cut it, it was way too late.

lambdadmitry 6y ago
I'm not sure where that narrative comes from. I certainly haven't seen any evidence for British response blindly following an influenza playbook. The closest I've seen was journalists speculating on twitter, but that's not an evidence. Neither is the fact that the UK was preparing for an influenza pandemic.
- mantap 6y ago
  It comes from comparing the contents of the pandemic influenza planning documents to the actions of the government in the covid-19 crisis and noting the eerie similarity.
  - lambdadmitry 6y ago
    Correlation is not causation is all I can say.

ppf 6y ago

I think recent news is showing that a practical implementation of New Zealand's approach is not sufficient to acheive the required containment goal.

joshvm 6y ago

On the island bit - the travel situation is quite different to NZ. We have a lot more traffic for business, multiple busy airports, a rail link to the Schengen area and cheap access to international travel. We probably had a lot more routes for the virus to get in, and I think the assumption now is that it was circulating since the winter (although most of the news websites I can find are screaming tabloids). Politically, locking down borders was not palatable to the government - I don't think we ever closed the border actually, we just made it very impractical for people to travel. Someone was actually able to get to Paris for a haircut a month or so ago. https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/18/locked-down-brits-in-need-of-a-haircut-can-just-get-one-in-paris https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/18/locked-down-brits-in-nee...

tomatocracy 6y ago

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that policy in relation to care homes is likely to have been a factor which made things significantly worse in the UK. Patients were deliberately moved out of hospitals into care homes without tests for SARS-CoV-2 infection, in order to free up hospital beds, and in so doing gave the virus to other residents of those homes. Our care home sector was also more vulnerable than most because it (a) consists of individual care homes which are relatively large and (b) is staffed in large part by agency staff who work in multiple homes. We're not the only country or region which made this mistake of course and this wasn't the only mistake made but the surprising thing is how long it took for the government to recognise and correct this. Part of that is probably human nature ("we have a plan, stick to the plan"), but I suspect part of it is old-fashioned civil service incompetence too (the same incompetence which led to this being the plan to start with).

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

>I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country. They're not. What version of "every country" do you have in mind? Most other countries also failed at contact tracing early on. The only country in Europe that had and used effective contact tracing was Germany. Almost everywhere else it has made little or not contribution. If you look at the epi curves then the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have had basically the same outbreak (France a little less). So there is no need to wonder why the UK is special because it isn't. There is plenty to say about which European countries responded well and which didn't and why even Germany's response was markedly inferior to countries like Vietnam but that has to start from a data driven perspective that doesn't pretend that the UK is particularly special.

unfunco 6y ago

I'm not disagreeing with the statement, we've done very poorly, but I feel comparisons to Australia, and especially NZ are way off, London is the city with the most air traffic globally and the virus was here much earlier than the point in time we were asked to stay at home, we might be a relatively small island nation but we're also one of the busiest.

tomcooks 6y ago

Pride is the first thing that comes to mind, it would also explain why they drive on the opposite side of the road, have a separate faucet for hot water, and so on and so forth. /s