Press briefing today- data clearly shows that the UK has essentially followed the Italy curve almost exactly. Germany shows an early plateau & is moving the S. Korea way. What have all these countries done differently? They have all tested aggressively, contact traced & isolated.

Really infuriating that the government let this happen which has already costs thousands of lives. The total no. of fatalities in Germany likely to be much lower due to control measures. PHE still won't admit they got this wrong. Their analysis is based on a stat model published

in Feb. The parameters within this model were based on a gap between symptoms and isolation being between 3.4-8 days. It's far more realistic for this gap to be 1 day now with drive thru rapid testing available in different countries, where results are provided within 6 hrs.

With these new parameters, results are very different, and suggest contact tracing would have been effective in control. Also empirical evidence from so many countries support this approach. It's hard to believe that we haven't followed these measures.

Testing appears to be in disarray. After scientists claiming a couple of wks ago that tests would be available by last week(!), they now say tests are very error prone, and this will take at least a month. Why the conflicted reporting on this? Wouldn't it have been better to

validate tests before making very unrealistic claims and raising public expectations.

Of interest, many countries that did testing at scale did not institute nationwide lockdowns, and still managed to flatten the curve substantially. Because they were detecting community cases, interventions were precise to the outbreaks observed (e.g. church closures in S. Korea)

Many of these countries shut down schools only very recently well after the curve had been flattened. Did mass testing and contact tracing allow them to delay lockdown measures until much later, so they were not as restrictive to the public?

Lockdown is a measure that has been shown to be effective in models- not questioning this. But Italy instituted lockdown and despite this did not achieve control for a very long time. By contrast mass testing and contact tracing appears to be associated with much earlier plateaus

In a pandemic like this, we have to consider the most effective measures, and implement all of these. We really lost an opportunity on this one, and it's time the govt and its scientific advisors admit they got this wrong.

Govt now admitting that antibody tests far from accurate, and that test development will take time. If only they had put this much energy into procuring capacity for PCR rapid tests that have been available since late Feb.