It would appear that the reverse is true .
A genuinely effective response seems to be the economic optimum - Denmark has done remarkably well.
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Great thread, great signages… 
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I watched Global Questions on BBC this morning. There was a lady from the WHO and also a Epidemiology professor from Oxford, who was clearly part of the government decision making based on her level of defensiveness.
WHO lady was very much focused on the ‘cutting off the head’ methods of controlling the virus: Robust testing, test and trace systems, focussing on clusters. Basically attacking the virus early and hard.
The epidemiology professor from Oxford, she was focussing completely on living with the virus and the next steps that will be stronger shielding of the elderly and those with comorbidities. And trying to prepare our health system. That is not in itself a bad thing given the UK’s situation. But it was the dismissal of what the WHO expert was saying about trying to stop the virus early to avoid getting into a bad place. The shaking of her head when the WHO expert started mentioning testing, tracing and clusters as if those three issues aren’t the priority. Her message was that we need to get back to living and that the solution to this is to shield the elderly.
The rot in this government, hell in this country is deep. I have seen numerous UK epidemiologists on TV and I dont think Ive seen one ever agree with the WHO. Is that what we’ve come to? Assume we know better and the rest of the world be damned? Well its not working. We are the ones who are damned.
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To me, that corresponds very well with what the report that @Arminius posted a little earlier in this thread, and in particular Japan’s relative success.
Problem you have is that due to earlier failures you are now forced to live with it. Gaining control from this point is extremely difficult. I bet the epidemiologist didn’t admit to that.
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I made a comment in the other place about how I was so impressed with Denmark when I visited last year with my family that I felt whatever they did would almost certainly be brilliant.
Not necessarily transferable, of course, but I have huge faith in the Danes taking effective action on things like this.
Oh, I’ve seen and heard several. Don’t forget that the WHOs initial response to the outbreak was almost universally panned and they’ve been in a process of damage limitation themselves almost ever since. It’s all very well lecturing countries from their ivory towers but unfortunately the genie’s out of the bottle now.
The rather pragmatic approach advocated by the Oxford epidemiologist does have considerable support. I listened to a professor of mathematics (I think) on radio 5 live last week saying that getting to herd immunity is likely to be more quickly attainable than an effective vaccine. What I found particularly remarkable was her claim that the population only needed to have as little as 15-20% immunity to achieve this when I always thought it needed to be up in the 85-90% region.
I wasn’t convinced about her arguments that there was evidence of strong immunity lasting for at least 6 months (citing the low numbers of reinfection). The virus itself is barely 6 months old in terms of significant transmission so I would have thought it far too early to draw that sort of conclusion.
I think it must be based on a study by scientists in Scotland Is the COVID-19 Herd Immunity Threshold as Low as 15 Percent?
Personally I would try and keep as much going as possible. Isolate the care homes, direct all new covid cases to separate medical facilities, keep the hospitals running as normally as possible.
Scrap HS2 - divert those funds towards improving hospital facilities, extending the furlough programme, and improving existing transport and communication infrastructure. Properly tax these huge companies - imagine how much Amazon will have made in the last six months?!
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In the UK we must already have reached that figure of 15% given that over 600,000 have tested positive and that doesn’t include all the ones that caught it before tests were available. Happy days 
But the numbers are still climbing, alarmingly so. I honestly don’t understand how you get herd immunity with only 15% of the population.
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Apparently there are more hospital admissions due to Covid in the UK now than in March.
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Hmm disturbing.
I’m trying to listen to then current update.
Ironically, they state that controlling the virus is about controlling transmission.
They also pretty much admitted that the North of the England was opened up too early.
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You’ll probably have a direct a link to that. You are from the opposite side of the political spectrum to me so your sources of information are almost certainly going to be coloured differently to mine. If you are talking about their early report of “no proof of human transmission” when in fact there was actually no proof at that point of human transmission, then you are clutching at straws.
WHO have made plenty of mistakes throughout this without doubt, and probably hoodwinked by Chaina just a little bit. Beyond organisations, almost all countries have made mistakes too. But most of them (and WHO) had the best of intentions, basing their responses on previous viral outbreaks and what they knew of this virus at the time. Most. Just not UK. We march to the beat of our own drum.
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I have less hope. I think we have a tendency to learn the wrong lessons, and on the odd chance we learn the right one tend to be very forgetful.
For instance, I know many people who view this situation as a fuck up of a government response, and so their response to double down on the party that argues for smaller government
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Strange to suggest that I’m probably clutching at straws when you acknowledge, literally in the next paragraph, that “WHO have made plenty of mistakes throughout this without doubt”. Do I need to link you to these mistakes and the justified criticisms directed towards WHO if you acknowledge yourself that they’ve made “plenty of mistakes”? Seems a bit pointless. You can look for these yourself but it seems you are already aware of them. 
You really think that the UK government (and it’s scientific advisors) didn’t have the best of intentions, whatever you mean by that? I note that you say “we” but I was of the impression that you’re not in the UK?
Yes, much of the criticism of the WHOs response is based on misinterpreting what they’ve actually said and done.
“They said it wasn’t transmitted between people”
No they didnt. They said the current state of evidence does not yet show that, but they assume it does and are continuing to study it.
“It took them until march to call this a Pandemic”
Yes, and that doesn’t mean what you think it does.
For certain countries/administration, there is political hay to be made by claiming their ability to respond has been limited by bad leadership from the WHO, but this is along the same line of claiming that Fauci claimed that masks didnt work then changed his mind.
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Well, I did say ‘shimmer of hope’ (not sure that is proper English)… and I already said ‘maybe not though’…
On the other hand - those people you know - do they live in Florida? 
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“glimmer of hope” but your meaning was clear enough!
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I have seen a couple of analyses that really poke holes in this rather magical thinking. It relies on low thresholds, and very optimistic assumptions about the ability to isolate and protect vulnerable populations, as well as unsupported assumptions about the low levels of reinfection. An example:
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/21/2008087117
If any one of those assumptions is off, you get catastrophic levels. I saw another paper (German author) that actually accepted the 6 month immunity time frame, and demonstrated the likely effect was more or less an indefinite sine wave of peaks and valleys - with the chilling possibility that prior infection causing damage itself becomes a risk factor, such that each wave produces more of the vulnerable population.
Frankly, I think governments need to stop the magical thinking and start developing an end game. A vaccine might be developed that will provide a controlled tool, but more than that seems unlikely. Too many governments are simply treading water and hoping for something good to happen.
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This world is filled with avoidable and unavoidable mistakes. For instance, the cruise ship the Diamond Princess IMO was an unavoidable mistake. Little was known of the virus at that point and there was nothing to suggest that there was a significant risk of an outbreak on the ship before it set sail.
But the Grand Princess, Ruby Princess and the other 40(!!) plus cruise ships after that which had cases of COVID-19 onboard were all avoidable mistakes. Nobody should be boarding a cruise ship and no captain should be setting sail in the current climate.
I don’t know what you expect of WHO, whether you think they should be capable of predicting the future accurately? Or understanding how a virus will react without having seen it in a lab or under any sort of conditions? They had to work off what they knew of previous viruses, but also unfortunately from info sourced from China which is probably not the best source if you want transparency. There were mistakes in there. But to be seriously criticised is a bit much given the lack of knowledge at the time.
It would be a pretty big stretch to suggest the UK’s handling of the virus response was unavoidable. Fuck, there are plenty of countries that responded better in April than the UK government are doing now (test and trace for instance). We went out in our own direction. And there is a reason we are alone out here.
I am back in the UK btw after taking a year away in sunny Queensland.
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Shit thats scary. I was just going to ask people’s thoughts on prior infection and whether they think it would provide a better antiviral response from the body or not. What is known about reinfection seems to be so miniscule as to be completely unreliable at this stage so its probably not worth discussing yet though.
EDIT: It does seem from what you are saying you are speaking directly to people who got hit hard on their previous infection (causing long term damage) rather than people who barely registered above asymptomatic?
It seems the jury is still out on that from a population level, but there seems little doubt that some of the people suffering from sustained respiratory damage months after the virus has cleared would be very vulnerable.
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