Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

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Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Cardinal Fang » Fri May 22, 2020 12:00 am

Climate modeller James Annan has suggested that if the UK government had imposed its lockdown a week earlie, on 16 March, rather than 23 March, death and infections rates would be dramatically lower, and the UK would have needed a shorter, cheaper, less damaging lockdown in economic terms. He suggests that 30,000 lives could have been saved

https://bskiesresearch.wordpress.com/20 ... -lockdown/

This would seem a little oversimple to me, but I don't know enough about these sorts of models to work out how accurate it might be.

Anyone smart want to look it over?

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by shpalman » Fri May 22, 2020 6:19 am

Don't see anything wrong with that.

Of course it assumes that people would have followed the lockdown procedures in the same way if they had been implemented earlier. However it's hard to imagine that the situation would have been worse by implementing it earlier.
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by AMS » Fri May 22, 2020 8:10 am

Seems plausible to me to, and they mentioned something similar on more or less the other day as a factor in Germany's much lower number of cases.

And aside from the more sophisticated modelling, it makes sense from basic arithmetic too - the doubling time pre-lockdown was about 3.5 days, so 1 week is two doublings, so four-fold increase in infections for every week that passes.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by lpm » Fri May 22, 2020 8:12 am

It's bollocks.

It assumes the lockdown began on the government mandated date of Monday 23 March, then calculates the difference if the lockdown had begun on Monday 16 March. Which is indeed about 30k - a very simple and obvious calculation: two doublings a week, so 4x higher a week later, so 3/4 fatalities due to one week delay.

But of course the UK lockdown began far earlier than the government mandated date of Monday 23 March. My last day in the office was 10 March, the Cheltenham races went ahead on 11-13 March to great controversy, football on Saturday 14 March was abandoned, public transport stats for London show a massive drop in the week beginning 16 March, keeping schools officially open that week looked silly as more and more parents kept their children home.

Without our actions, the government delay of 11 days would have killed around 200,000 extra people.

You can do it on a spreadsheet, but in the real world you can't just shift the maths forward by one week.

There is absolutely no doubt that voluntary action by us the people saved tens of thousands of lives, because we all acted many days earlier than the government demanded. The scandal here isn't that the govt cost 30,000 lives, it's that the govt abdicated their duties and left it to the people to take leadership.
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Little waster » Fri May 22, 2020 8:37 am

lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 8:12 am
It's bollocks.

It assumes the lockdown began on the government mandated date of Monday 23 March, then calculates the difference if the lockdown had begun on Monday 16 March. Which is indeed about 30k - a very simple and obvious calculation: two doublings a week, so 4x higher a week later, so 3/4 fatalities due to one week delay.

But of course the UK lockdown began far earlier than the government mandated date of Monday 23 March. My last day in the office was 10 March, the Cheltenham races went ahead on 11-13 March to great controversy, football on Saturday 14 March was abandoned, public transport stats for London show a massive drop in the week beginning 16 March, keeping schools officially open that week looked silly as more and more parents kept their children home.

Without our actions, the government delay of 11 days would have killed around 200,000 extra people.

You can do it on a spreadsheet, but in the real world you can't just shift the maths forward by one week.

There is absolutely no doubt that voluntary action by us the people saved tens of thousands of lives, because we all acted many days earlier than the government demanded. The scandal here isn't that the govt cost 30,000 lives, it's that the govt abdicated their duties and left it to the people to take leadership.

And yet the official narrative remains that the government were guided by the very best scientific advice and most up-to-date information and that the early hours of Friday 20th March was the very earliest time that the need for a serious lockdown became apparent (do NOT look at Scotland!).

Meanwhile the man on the Clapham omnibus correctly read the writing on the wall 2 weeks earlier.
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Woodchopper » Fri May 22, 2020 8:42 am

AMS wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 8:10 am
And aside from the more sophisticated modelling, it makes sense from basic arithmetic too - the doubling time pre-lockdown was about 3.5 days, so 1 week is two doublings, so four-fold increase in infections for every week that passes.
I think it was faster than that. Looking at the now available death certificate data it was doubling about every 2 days from 7 March through to 18 March, and about every two and a half days from then through to 23 March. On 7 March there had been 5 deaths, and 16 days later there were 756.

One key date is the statement on 12 March by the European CDC recommending immediate measures (eg school closures etc). On that day there had only been 32 deaths in the UK. Four days later it was 141, and six days later it was 267.

I'm just using deaths as a proxy for the number of cases [eta with a lag of a few weeks], but it seems to be a better one than number of positive tests.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Woodchopper » Fri May 22, 2020 9:42 am

lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 8:12 am
It's bollocks.

It assumes the lockdown began on the government mandated date of Monday 23 March, then calculates the difference if the lockdown had begun on Monday 16 March. Which is indeed about 30k - a very simple and obvious calculation: two doublings a week, so 4x higher a week later, so 3/4 fatalities due to one week delay.

But of course the UK lockdown began far earlier than the government mandated date of Monday 23 March. My last day in the office was 10 March, the Cheltenham races went ahead on 11-13 March to great controversy, football on Saturday 14 March was abandoned, public transport stats for London show a massive drop in the week beginning 16 March, keeping schools officially open that week looked silly as more and more parents kept their children home.

Without our actions, the government delay of 11 days would have killed around 200,000 extra people.

You can do it on a spreadsheet, but in the real world you can't just shift the maths forward by one week.

There is absolutely no doubt that voluntary action by us the people saved tens of thousands of lives, because we all acted many days earlier than the government demanded. The scandal here isn't that the govt cost 30,000 lives, it's that the govt abdicated their duties and left it to the people to take leadership.
To a certain extent.

If we look at the Google data the UK lock-down began in the week starting 16 March, and by the Friday attendance at workplaces was down by 29%.
Google creepy data.jpg
Google creepy data.jpg (344.25 KiB) Viewed 5950 times
But there was a much bigger effect in the following week which coincided with the announcement of the UK lock-down. Its difficult to know what would have happened without the government announcement. But still, it seems to me that its the most likely explanation for the decreased workplace presence in the second week. Similar applies to retail and recreation and to transit stations.

Not as big a drop in grocery and pharmacy shopping, which will be down to toile paper stockpiling.

Anyway, before dismissing the claim as bollocks, maybe good to see whether the above has been included in Annan's model.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Blackcountryboy » Fri May 22, 2020 11:11 am

We usually shop on Friday but we 16 March concerned about panic buying I went on Wednesday. Went to Sainsburys first, it was packed, like foot
ball terraces in the 1950s, I decided shopping there was not a goog idea and walked right out. I then went to Tesco, crowded but not as bad as Sainsburys so did some shopping, couldn't get everthing so went our usual supermarket, Waitroses, and completed our weekly shop. I wonder how many people who were not at work that week were visiting a lot of crowded supermarkets to panic buy. Could panic buying have been stopped at that time?

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by shpalman » Fri May 22, 2020 11:17 am

lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 8:12 am
It's bollocks.

It assumes the lockdown began on the government mandated date of Monday 23 March, then calculates the difference if the lockdown had begun on Monday 16 March. Which is indeed about 30k - a very simple and obvious calculation: two doublings a week, so 4x higher a week later, so 3/4 fatalities due to one week delay.

But of course the UK lockdown began far earlier than the government mandated date of Monday 23 March. My last day in the office was 10 March, the Cheltenham races went ahead on 11-13 March to great controversy, football on Saturday 14 March was abandoned, public transport stats for London show a massive drop in the week beginning 16 March, keeping schools officially open that week looked silly as more and more parents kept their children home.

Without our actions, the government delay of 11 days would have killed around 200,000 extra people.

You can do it on a spreadsheet, but in the real world you can't just shift the maths forward by one week.

There is absolutely no doubt that voluntary action by us the people saved tens of thousands of lives, because we all acted many days earlier than the government demanded. The scandal here isn't that the govt cost 30,000 lives, it's that the govt abdicated their duties and left it to the people to take leadership.
Yes, his model is simplistic, because it assumes switching from a natural R0 to a post-lockdown Rt, while as you point out some voluntary behaviour would have reduced R even before the government actually developed the nerve to tell people what to do, and even after it did there would still have been people taking the piss.

If you're comparing to Italy, or "four weeks behind Italy" to give the country its full name, bear in mind that lots of things were shut down well before the full national lockdown. For example, on the 22nd of February the "red zones" were locked down and sporting events in Lombardy and Veneto were shut down; in late February all the bars were briefly shut and then they were allowed to open only during the day but the whole of Lombardy was declared a "yellow zone" by the 1st of March; all the schools were closed nationwide on the 4th of March. The first big lockdown wasn't until the 8th of March, that's when we started needing to auto-certify why we were travelling around in the north, and this was extended nationwide on the 9th.

Effectively this means Lombardy was locked down too late (the virus was almost certainly in free circulation by mid February in some areas by the time "patient one" finally got tested) while areas further south benefited from being locked down "too early".

This is why Lombardy has had nearly 1600 deaths per million based on just the official figures, and surely a lot more when you take into account the massive spike in excess deaths towards the beginning of the outbreak which I've posted about a few times, while Lazio for example (population about 6 million) which has Rome in it (so you can hardly complain it's a sparsely-populated backwater) has had about 110 deaths per million.

Yesterday the regions of Basilicata, Bolzano, Calabria, Molise, Puglia, Sicilia, Trento, Umbria, and Valle d'Aosta did not register any deaths. The regions of Bolzano and Calabria reported no new positive cases. Some of those may be backwaters (who even knows where Molise is?) but Sicily has 5 million people on it and only reported 6 new positive cases yesterday which is less than the province of Como; Calabria has a population of nearly 2 million and isn't even an island. Campania has a population of 5.8 million and has Napoli in it, and if you can lock that place down you can lock anywhere down (here is the sort of thing which health care professionals have to deal with in Napoli) and yesterday they had 9 new positives and 2 deaths.

oH bUt i bEt TheIr nOt tEsTiNg pRoPeRly yeah like the UK isn't fiddling its numbers.

Lockdown worked and it should have been done sooner, and if it had have been done sooner it would have been possible to lift it sooner. But you couldn't say that at the time (mid March was already later than it needed to be, the UK could perfectly well see what had happened in Italy by then) because "people's feelings are important" or something and closing schools is hard. The government is now finding that actually it's opening them which is hard. And people feel pretty sh.t right now for all sorts of reasons.

There was far too much "Well akshully..." from the "experts".

Well akshully you can't lock down too early because then it will go on too long and people will get bored of it (this seems to be based on Whitty's personal experience of patients in medical practice who do not see drug prescriptions through to their completion, and not supported by the behavioural scientists appointed by the government itself to Sage’s subcommittee, SPI–B)

Well akshully you can't close the schools because key workers need someone to look after their children (by the time one symptomatic case shows up in someone connected to the school and you have to shut the whole thing down anyway, how many people have to self-quarantine?)

Well akshully face masks won't stop you getting the virus (you wear a mask to stop you giving the virus to someone else during your asymptomatic phase)

Well akshully viruses like this die out over the summer / get milder with time on their own (nobody knows how this one is going to behave but it seems like it managed to spread in all sorts of different parts of the world)

Well akshully if you manage to suppress it now there will just be a worse second wave when you lift the restrictions (the 1918 influenza seemed to mutate to a more aggressive strain which was favoured and spread because of the first world war; if a second wave of covid infections seems to be coming we'll have a better idea of how to lock down, we'll benefit from the testing capacity which has been built up, and we'll also have better idea of how to treat patients)

Don't at me.
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Martin Y » Fri May 22, 2020 11:32 am

Blackcountryboy wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 11:11 am
… Could panic buying have been stopped at that time?
Reduced, I suppose, by "only x per customer" rules being introduced sooner, but some stuff would still disappear. It doesn't take the imagined obvious panic buyers with a teetering mountain of loo roll in their trolley to cause a shortage, just for everyone to cautiously buy a spare pack each time when they normally only buy a pack every ten visits to the shops.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by AMS » Fri May 22, 2020 12:10 pm

Perhaps the thing to focus on is the point about all models being wrong but some models being useful (or whatever the quote was). Is this model useful?

We can quibble about nuances of when people started to change their behaviour, and whether that would be 30,000 or some other number, but it seems likely that the 10^4 order of magnitude is right.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Woodchopper » Fri May 22, 2020 12:32 pm

shpalman wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 11:17 am
Yesterday the regions of Basilicata, Bolzano, Calabria, Molise, Puglia, Sicilia, Trento, Umbria, and Valle d'Aosta did not register any deaths. The regions of Bolzano and Calabria reported no new positive cases. Some of those may be backwaters (who even knows where Molise is?) but Sicily has 5 million people on it and only reported 6 new positive cases yesterday which is less than the province of Como; Calabria has a population of nearly 2 million and isn't even an island. Campania has a population of 5.8 million and has Napoli in it, and if you can lock that place down you can lock anywhere down (here is the sort of thing which health care professionals have to deal with in Napoli) and yesterday they had 9 new positives and 2 deaths.

oH bUt i bEt TheIr nOt tEsTiNg pRoPeRly yeah like the UK isn't fiddling its numbers.

Lockdown worked and it should have been done sooner, and if it had have been done sooner it would have been possible to lift it sooner. But you couldn't say that at the time (mid March was already later than it needed to be, the UK could perfectly well see what had happened in Italy by then) because "people's feelings are important" or something and closing schools is hard. The government is now finding that actually it's opening them which is hard. And people feel pretty sh.t right now for all sorts of reasons.
And just in Europe there is:

Albania
Austria
Bosnia
Bulgaria
Croatia
Cyprus
Czechia
Estonia
Finland
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Kosovo
Latvia
Lithuania
Norway
Poland
Romania
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Ukraine

which have had mortality rates a tenth or lower then the UK.

I haven't been able to look at all of them, but it looks like the common factor is that they brought in measures like things like closing non-essential shops and schools at or before the first death was recorded, whereas the UK waited a fortnight.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by EACLucifer » Fri May 22, 2020 12:33 pm

shpalman wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 11:17 am
lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 8:12 am
It's bollocks.

It assumes the lockdown began on the government mandated date of Monday 23 March, then calculates the difference if the lockdown had begun on Monday 16 March. Which is indeed about 30k - a very simple and obvious calculation: two doublings a week, so 4x higher a week later, so 3/4 fatalities due to one week delay.

But of course the UK lockdown began far earlier than the government mandated date of Monday 23 March. My last day in the office was 10 March, the Cheltenham races went ahead on 11-13 March to great controversy, football on Saturday 14 March was abandoned, public transport stats for London show a massive drop in the week beginning 16 March, keeping schools officially open that week looked silly as more and more parents kept their children home.

Without our actions, the government delay of 11 days would have killed around 200,000 extra people.

You can do it on a spreadsheet, but in the real world you can't just shift the maths forward by one week.

There is absolutely no doubt that voluntary action by us the people saved tens of thousands of lives, because we all acted many days earlier than the government demanded. The scandal here isn't that the govt cost 30,000 lives, it's that the govt abdicated their duties and left it to the people to take leadership.
Yes, his model is simplistic, because it assumes switching from a natural R0 to a post-lockdown Rt, while as you point out some voluntary behaviour would have reduced R even before the government actually developed the nerve to tell people what to do, and even after it did there would still have been people taking the piss.

If you're comparing to Italy, or "four weeks behind Italy" to give the country its full name, bear in mind that lots of things were shut down well before the full national lockdown. For example, on the 22nd of February the "red zones" were locked down and sporting events in Lombardy and Veneto were shut down; in late February all the bars were briefly shut and then they were allowed to open only during the day but the whole of Lombardy was declared a "yellow zone" by the 1st of March; all the schools were closed nationwide on the 4th of March. The first big lockdown wasn't until the 8th of March, that's when we started needing to auto-certify why we were travelling around in the north, and this was extended nationwide on the 9th.

Effectively this means Lombardy was locked down too late (the virus was almost certainly in free circulation by mid February in some areas by the time "patient one" finally got tested) while areas further south benefited from being locked down "too early".

This is why Lombardy has had nearly 1600 deaths per million based on just the official figures, and surely a lot more when you take into account the massive spike in excess deaths towards the beginning of the outbreak which I've posted about a few times, while Lazio for example (population about 6 million) which has Rome in it (so you can hardly complain it's a sparsely-populated backwater) has had about 110 deaths per million.

Yesterday the regions of Basilicata, Bolzano, Calabria, Molise, Puglia, Sicilia, Trento, Umbria, and Valle d'Aosta did not register any deaths. The regions of Bolzano and Calabria reported no new positive cases. Some of those may be backwaters (who even knows where Molise is?) but Sicily has 5 million people on it and only reported 6 new positive cases yesterday which is less than the province of Como; Calabria has a population of nearly 2 million and isn't even an island. Campania has a population of 5.8 million and has Napoli in it, and if you can lock that place down you can lock anywhere down (here is the sort of thing which health care professionals have to deal with in Napoli) and yesterday they had 9 new positives and 2 deaths.

oH bUt i bEt TheIr nOt tEsTiNg pRoPeRly yeah like the UK isn't fiddling its numbers.

Lockdown worked and it should have been done sooner, and if it had have been done sooner it would have been possible to lift it sooner. But you couldn't say that at the time (mid March was already later than it needed to be, the UK could perfectly well see what had happened in Italy by then) because "people's feelings are important" or something and closing schools is hard. The government is now finding that actually it's opening them which is hard. And people feel pretty sh.t right now for all sorts of reasons.

There was far too much "Well akshully..." from the "experts".

Well akshully you can't lock down too early because then it will go on too long and people will get bored of it (this seems to be based on Whitty's personal experience of patients in medical practice who do not see drug prescriptions through to their completion, and not supported by the behavioural scientists appointed by the government itself to Sage’s subcommittee, SPI–B)

Well akshully you can't close the schools because key workers need someone to look after their children (by the time one symptomatic case shows up in someone connected to the school and you have to shut the whole thing down anyway, how many people have to self-quarantine?)

Well akshully face masks won't stop you getting the virus (you wear a mask to stop you giving the virus to someone else during your asymptomatic phase)

Well akshully viruses like this die out over the summer / get milder with time on their own (nobody knows how this one is going to behave but it seems like it managed to spread in all sorts of different parts of the world)

Well akshully if you manage to suppress it now there will just be a worse second wave when you lift the restrictions (the 1918 influenza seemed to mutate to a more aggressive strain which was favoured and spread because of the first world war; if a second wave of covid infections seems to be coming we'll have a better idea of how to lock down, we'll benefit from the testing capacity which has been built up, and we'll also have better idea of how to treat patients)

Don't at me.
All this is absolutely spot on. I'll just pick out one bit to further agree with.
Well akshully you can't lock down too early because then it will go on too long and people will get bored of it
The actual fix to this is to not delay lockdown. Earlier lockdown = shorter lockdown. Better yet is to never stop testing and contact tracing; some of the nations that have handled this best never had to lock down at all.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by lpm » Fri May 22, 2020 1:51 pm

AMS wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 12:10 pm
We can quibble about nuances of when people started to change their behaviour, and whether that would be 30,000 or some other number, but it seems likely that the 10^4 order of magnitude is right.
There's two different ways of looking at it. Total lives saved have been in the 10^5 order - mostly thanks to us, some thanks to the government. Total lives lost by the government are about 30,000 - thanks to the Tories.

The notorious "4 weeks behind Italy" briefing when the government refused to act was on Thurs 12 March. Woodchopper's table shows voluntary action began immediately, with reductions on 13 March and across the weekend 14/15 March - when football was cancelled, theatres were shunned and pubs were quiet. The workplaces figure steadily reduced each day of the week of 16 March (and interestingly took a few days to fully come down after the official 23 March date).

The 11 days gap between voluntary and official lockdown would have been 3 doublings if we'd all followed the government line. 8x. What we need is a zero lockdown R0 model for 12 March onwards, rather the actual observed R0 used by James Annan. We can then apportion lives saved between the 11 days of voluntary lockdown and the govt's action. I suspect it's something like 100,000 lives saved by the 11 days and 50,000 by the govt lockdown - would have been approx 200,000 without any intervention.

To get the number of people killed by the government's deliberate policy of running hot for herd immunity, it's an easier calculation. No need for models:

Germany's deaths (official count) per million = 97.56
UK population 66.65 million = 6,502 deaths if we'd matched Germany's success
Actual UK deaths (official count) = 36,393
Killed by the Conservatives = 29,891
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Woodchopper » Fri May 22, 2020 2:03 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 1:51 pm
To get the number of people killed by the government's deliberate policy of running hot for herd immunity, it's an easier calculation. No need for models:

Germany's deaths (official count) per million = 97.56
UK population 66.65 million = 6,502 deaths if we'd matched Germany's success
Actual UK deaths (official count) = 36,393
Killed by the Conservatives = 29,891
Why pick Germany? Why not countries like Poland whose rates are a quarter of Germany's.

Just think, if London could have been as effective as Warsaw then about 95% of the deaths in Britain wouldn't have happened.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by lpm » Fri May 22, 2020 2:12 pm

Germany is a good mid-case - hit by a lot of imported cases from Italy. Likewise Austria, all those skiers bringing the virus home. Or Portugal, next door to raging hot Spain. Or Denmark. These countries all did well when facing tougher challenges than the UK due to porous borders.

Deaths per million:

Austria 70
Denmark 97
Germany 98
Portugal 125
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri May 22, 2020 2:13 pm

Martin Y wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 11:32 am
Blackcountryboy wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 11:11 am
… Could panic buying have been stopped at that time?
Reduced, I suppose, by "only x per customer" rules being introduced sooner, but some stuff would still disappear. It doesn't take the imagined obvious panic buyers with a teetering mountain of loo roll in their trolley to cause a shortage, just for everyone to cautiously buy a spare pack each time when they normally only buy a pack every ten visits to the shops.
Panic buying seems have been largely restricted to the UK and USA. I'm not 100% what's wrong with the national culture in those two places, but it can't just be blamed on "human nature".
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri May 22, 2020 2:15 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 2:12 pm
Germany is a good mid-case - hit by a lot of imported cases from Italy. Likewise Austria, all those skiers bringing the virus home. Or Portugal, next door to raging hot Spain. Or Denmark. These countries all did well when facing tougher challenges than the UK due to porous borders.

Deaths per million:

Austria 70
Denmark 97
Germany 98
Portugal 125
Portugal also shows that you don't actually need a lot of money, or a well-resourced national health service, to save lives. You just have to tell people what to do, and hope that enough of the people aren't c.nts.
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by lpm » Fri May 22, 2020 2:19 pm

Or, if you want to compare UK to all of Europe (average 223 per million, including UK), gives 14,462 if UK had merely matched the average, giving 21,500 people killed by the Conservatives.
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Martin Y » Fri May 22, 2020 2:33 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 2:13 pm
Panic buying seems have been largely restricted to the UK and USA.
That would be curious if so, but I'm not sure it is.
My first stop was the Wiki page on panic buying and it describes it as a "major international phenomenon" during Feb/March this year.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by lpm » Fri May 22, 2020 2:36 pm

We shouldn't forget the UK's advantageous position going into this pandemic.

1) World's number 2 in the "global health security index" (it was talked about on this forum in Feb). The USA was number 1, ha ha ha. Netherlands which also f.cked up was number 3. https://www.ghsindex.org/

2) Fully unified healthcare system

3) World beating laboratory systems, testing abilities and testing capacity

4) An extremely popular government fresh from a landslide election victory, able to lead the country and take unpopular decisions

5) Fully prepared response plans, with experience learned from war games

6) Easy control over borders

7) Major player in WHO and other cross-border institutions, sharing best practice and with constant international communications

8 ) Wealthy G7 country

There's no way the UK should have been anything other than better than the European average. It couldn't achieve its last place merely by f.cking up with normal incompetence - this outcome required the deliberate policy decision of running hotter for herd immunity.
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Woodchopper
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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Woodchopper » Fri May 22, 2020 3:03 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 2:36 pm
We shouldn't forget the UK's advantageous position going into this pandemic.

1) World's number 2 in the "global health security index" (it was talked about on this forum in Feb). The USA was number 1, ha ha ha. Netherlands which also f.cked up was number 3. https://www.ghsindex.org/

Even better, the UK is at no. 1 for: RAPID RESPONSE TO AND MITIGATION OF THE SPREAD OF AN EPIDEMIC

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Woodchopper » Fri May 22, 2020 3:12 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 2:12 pm
Germany is a good mid-case - hit by a lot of imported cases from Italy. Likewise Austria, all those skiers bringing the virus home. Or Portugal, next door to raging hot Spain. Or Denmark. These countries all did well when facing tougher challenges than the UK due to porous borders.

Deaths per million:

Austria 70
Denmark 97
Germany 98
Portugal 125
What about Slovenia, border with northern Italy, and 5 per million, or Croatia, 20km from northern Italy and 23 per million.

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Woodchopper » Fri May 22, 2020 3:24 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 3:12 pm
lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 2:12 pm
Germany is a good mid-case - hit by a lot of imported cases from Italy. Likewise Austria, all those skiers bringing the virus home. Or Portugal, next door to raging hot Spain. Or Denmark. These countries all did well when facing tougher challenges than the UK due to porous borders.

Deaths per million:

Austria 70
Denmark 97
Germany 98
Portugal 125
What about Slovenia, border with northern Italy, and 5 per million, or Croatia, 20km from northern Italy and 23 per million.
Just been looking at Slovenia.

An Epidemic was declared on 12 March when there were 89 confirmed infections, and all educational institutions, bars and restaurants etc were closed from 16 March. Its first death was on 14 March.

The equivalent for the UK would have been Johnson announcing a lockdown on 6 March, when there were 363 confirmed cases and 1 death. If Slovenia could manage it then why couldn't Britain?

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Re: Could an earlier lockdown have saved 30,000?

Post by Trinucleus » Fri May 22, 2020 3:38 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 3:24 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 3:12 pm
lpm wrote:
Fri May 22, 2020 2:12 pm
Germany is a good mid-case - hit by a lot of imported cases from Italy. Likewise Austria, all those skiers bringing the virus home. Or Portugal, next door to raging hot Spain. Or Denmark. These countries all did well when facing tougher challenges than the UK due to porous borders.

Deaths per million:

Austria 70
Denmark 97
Germany 98
Portugal 125
What about Slovenia, border with northern Italy, and 5 per million, or Croatia, 20km from northern Italy and 23 per million.
Just been looking at Slovenia.

An Epidemic was declared on 12 March when there were 89 confirmed infections, and all educational institutions, bars and restaurants etc were closed from 16 March. Its first death was on 14 March.

The equivalent for the UK would have been Johnson announcing a lockdown on 6 March, when there were 363 confirmed cases and 1 death. If Slovenia could manage it then why couldn't Britain?
Because our PM was very reluctant to do something unpopular?

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