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Have to marvel at the complete incompetence of the UK government, and the dangerous approach to managing COVID-19. Essentially while saying that it isn't sensible to lift lockdown, because they haven't met the basic tests, they appear to be doing just that. Thread.
Boris has essentially announced that people who can't stay home and work 'can' go to work. This essentially means that many employees who aren't key workers are likely to be forced back to work as they will lose any protections if they don't, given the change in govt policy.
Let's remember that this decision has been made at a point where the PM himself confesses that the R is 'just below 1'. Not only is this the case, we know from SAGE that R isn't even trending downwards - 3 days ago in the daily briefing it was confirmed that R is on the rise.
So let's recap - we're still at a point where we have a subatantially large number of new cases & deaths/day, our R is rising due to the care home crisis, which shows no signs of abating, and we're currently 'just below 1'.
To make matters worse, we still don't have test and trace in place. We are still not testing all key workers, forget community testing. The digital app has run into huge issues - legal, security, and compatibility with apple & google phones.
There is no sign that any community test, trace & isolate strategy will be in place soon. We still don't have enough PPE for care homes and healthcare workers. Deaths in care homes are rising day on day. And we're talking about letting people go back to work, and opening schools.
Countries that took steps to ease lockdown in Europe, and even consider opening schools were at a completely different point in their trajectory & response. R in Denmark was 0.4-0.6, and when they opened schools it rose to 0.9. What's going to happen here?
This is a mistake. The govt has said repeatedly that it's guided by scientific evidence - I'd really like to see the evidence guiding this. I can't see any scientist in their right mind advocating this, at this point in the UK outbreak. This is dangerously negligent.
They said they wouldn't lift lockdown until five pillars were met. While they aren't calling this lifting lockdown, this is a big change, and will very likely increase transmission of virus in workplaces, and communities.
The PM says today 'we are testing literally hundreds of thousands of people every day. We have made fast progress on testing – but there is so much more to do now, and we can'. Where are these 'hundreds of thousands of tests' every day? Fast progress?
Not only have we 'literally' missed every target on testing capacity, after six weeks of lockdown we still aren't anywhere even near community testing. Care home workers are still struggling to get tested. Current testing turnaround is nowhere near where it needs to be.
We are exporting 50,000 tests to the US due to failures in local testing. We really need to be doing much better before we even thing about lifting lockdown measures. What is worrying is the govt doesn't appear to be learning from it's mistakes.
This will cost lives.
This will cost lives.
