What's become clear to me over the past few days is that the experts advised our government have got it badly wrong. They went down the path of assuming that endemic infection of our population was inevitable and therefore what is our best response.
It is clear that their underlying assumption and the ensuing guidance and measures was wrong. China has demonstrated very clearly that with strict isolation measures, the rates of infection can be very severely limited. Hubei province has a population roughly the same as that of the UK and yet they have managed to limit spread to only 80,000 cases. Elsewhere in China, clearly infections are much, much lower and *critically* they are not rising quickly either. We can easily manage numbers of this scale if spread out over several months.
There was some idiot government adviser on a Channel 4 documentary last night, steadfastly trying to defend the duff advice he had provided, saying yes but what will happen when China relax their restrictions. The answer of course is that they should ease off the restrictions gradually, and if numbers begin to rise again, then clamp down again.
We made need a few repeated relaxing and tightening of measures but by doing this I can see how it would be perfectly possible to keep the rate of new infections within the capacity of the health service to deal with them. This would have a huge impact on the overall survival rates and the number of unnecessary deaths. We would need to do this until such time as a vaccine arrives, which optimistically could be early next year. We may get respite this summer as well and life could potentially be relatively back to normal over the summer until we need to clamp down again as the winter months come.
I am convinced this is the right approach, and that the government's allowing 60% or 70% of the population to catch it, with the unavoidable massive overload of our resources, inability to treat patients requiring ICU support and ensuing needlessly high death rates, is absolutely wrong.
