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I agree to the extent that past experience tells us that rapid, imperfect action is often better than slow-but-perfect action in these instances, but it's really important to remember that (i) for all our talk of the blitz spirit we are a fairly liberal-inclined country that value our freedom and therefore police enforcement would only work to the degree that we consent to it, and (ii) even for those of us that are more likely to fall in line with government guidelines (myself included) "lockdown fatigue" is a real thing. Alongside epidemiological advice, one of the things that the government was told was "don't implement lockdown too early, because people will only comply for so long". What we're seeing right now is exactly that; the government guidelines are lagging slightly behind what people are already doing.
ffm-
I think these are fair points.
The time for criticism on many issues is now - for example: the Tories ineptitude when it comes to describing and implementing their own policies, or the state the NHS was in when this hit, or the potential for political decisions informing scientific proposals, or... But trying to make retroactive predictions or provide historical counterfactuals based on imperfect data and diverse cases is a waste of time. But there will be plenty of opportunities to do so in the future.
Imho.
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“lockdown fatigue" is a real thing.
Citation needed!
Alongside epidemiological advice, one of the things that the
government was told was "don't implement lockdown too early, because
people will only comply for so long”This was debunked. It came from government and Whitty, not the behavioural advisors.
Whitty cited his experience of patients and antibiotic courses. It didn’t come from the behavioural studies because they don’t support the idea.
miro_o
So when China, South Korea etc, who all have much greater experience in these matters than us, started to clamp down hard, our government faffed about and didn’t implement restrictions or even testing until weeks afterwards, you were happy with that? It wasn’t a difficult decision, it should have been a tough but necessary decision, but Johnson, being a libertarian conservative (which is fucked up in itself) didn’t have the balls to take the necessary steps. Which is we are where we are now.
If the world is to learn anything from this mess it’s that we need a worldwide immediate response to even the slightest sign of a pandemic in the future.