I believe it to be rubbish too. The longer they leave social distancing, the longer this is going to take. This is exponential growth and decay, where the change in the amount of virus we have dX is directly proportional to the amount of virus we have, X, at time t. It's a common process in the natural world and those curves and models that we keep seeing are models of exponential growth and decay. The one thing everyone knows about exponential growth and decay is that it's steep and precipitous, and we saw that in Wuhan.
We've been told that due to the R0 value of the virus, something that is unique to each virus, this one doubles every 4 days, and you see that in most countries. The only thing that differs between most countries is the time - it's a horizontal shift of the curve, hence we are 2-3 weeks behind Italy.
It's now the job of each country to smash the growth rate of the virus by interfering with the transmission. That can be done by social distancing (Wuhan) or by blanket testing and information technology (South Korea), sadly a lot of western health administrator don't believe you can stop it, and you can only control it, hence no Western nation has seriously implemented a testing program. It's a complere disgrace that we do not have easy access to tests. Not even Drs and nurses can get ready access to tests for themselves when they are ill (I know this).
We're now at 10,000 cases (so we are told??). That will be 20,000 in 4 days, then 40,000, 80,000, 160,000 is nothing is done, but if society shuts down and people do this properly, as happened in Wuhan, the virus will precipitously collapse in a relatively short period. It does depend on what we do though. That is why the government was criticised by scientists. We should be learning from other societies and their approaches and not ignoring them. Good science adapts models to the real world not dogma.
There are two models which completely decimated the virus: Wuhan (social control) and South Korea (intelligent targeted testing on a massive scale combined with anti-virals). We should be learning from these models, not ignoring them.
When I see completely empty squares and cities I am hugely encouraged because how can a virus grow in that environment? What worries me though is that what you don't see is where the people have gone. They are crammed tightly together in houses. Our families will infect each other, but not if it's done early enough. That's why it's very important that social distancing is done very quickly.
Everything that the British government is doing comes from the top of the medical profession and it you can see that it is informed by the idea of building up immunity i.e. they do not want to stop the infection in its tracks because they don't believe it is possible. The thing is it's been shown that you can do this. I hope Boris Johnson and his government get panicked by reality as the Germans, French, Spanish, and Italians have been, and react very quickly. If they do it slowly and wait weeks (as suggested - then they are deliberately trying to infect the healthy - whilst isolating the old and immune-compromised). They say the herd immunity was a PR blunder and they don't believe it, but everything they do and have done suggests they do actually believe this. Hopefully politicians will be shocked by reality and move fast now.
I am completely shocked that advanced Western nations with computers, lots of trained people, and testing kits did not follow the South Korea model. It was shown to work.
