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, rather than reopen things when R goes below 1 (which could easily become R > 1 a few weeks of reopening things) they decided to reopen when R was effectively 0. Big difference.
Imagine the UK being expected to remain in lockdown until community-transmitted cases dropped to 0.
And the corresponding action to this is to (re)start a lockdown as soon as R went over 1. Which would have been back in August, I think.
We could have had three or weeks of lock down to get shit back down again. Whilst schools were on holiday. With no real increase in death toll.
Instead, we had Eat Out to Help out, which had the opposite effect.
Then two months of procrastination and inaction.
It just seem so obvious that very fast, early lockdowns mean shorter lockdown, less economic impact and fewer deaths.
Instead of squashing these waves, we've been bloody surfing them.
mashton-
It just seem so obvious that very fast, early lockdowns mean shorter lockdown, less economic impact and fewer deaths.
Instead of squashing these waves, we've been bloody surfing them.
This. But everything is now so broken that people (in very broad generalisation) only accept measures when things are demonstrably bad enough. We/they don't believe projections from experts. Locking down until there were 10's of cases so that we could properly test and trace would have caused uproar.
See also Farage opportunistically launching an anti-lockdown party so he can profit from and stir up more confusion and dissent.
villa-ru
Compare the UK's approach of lockdown and then "Exit lockdown when R goes below 1" with Australia's:-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-54768038
Proactive testing and tracing. It'll never catch on.
So, rather than reopen things when R goes below 1 (which could easily become R > 1 a few weeks of reopening things) they decided to reopen when R was effectively 0. Big difference.
Imagine the UK being expected to remain in lockdown until community-transmitted cases dropped to 0.