Then you haven't thought about the Taiwanese, South Korean and Australian c ounter examples.
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Taiwan was extremely well prepared, so it may not be a realistic example th at the UK might have copied. South Korea was there to be copied, and it did n't bother to go into lock down.
Australia is enough like the UK if the UK had had enough sense to have adop ted the same kind of approach as we did, they should have done just as well . The UK does take a more spartan approach to health care and might not hav e been able to russle up enough contact tracing staff do do as well, but if they had avoided the time wasted while they were thinking that herd immuni ty was a sensible thing to aim for, they could have had many fewer deaths t han they have had, and been able to get out of lock down rather faster.
I am talking about the situation the UK finds itself in now rather than some alternative reality where they actually followed scientific advice. I have no expectation that they will do contact tracing effectively - the contractors given the job in England are notoriously unreliable.
Worse the government is now in complete disarray with a one law for the PM's special advisor and one for everyone else. You can now drive unlimited distances to exercise and people are flocking to major beauty spots and beaches. Think about what that does to virus transmission.
We have pretty much lost control due to government incompetence. The least bad option from where we are now is to minimise fatalities as we restart the economy. The risk to under 45's is demonstrably very much less than to all other age groups. Lockdown has actually saved the lives of enough young men who would otherwise have died in car crashes to make the death rate for that youngest demographic go down!
They are still fighting to keep it in check though. And will have to maintain that level of vigilance essentially forever.
Unless and until there is an effective vaccine herd immunity built up in the people who are least affected by it is the only realistic way forward. We cannot shut down the entire world economy for 18 months in the hope that a working vaccine can be made and in sufficient quantity.
Whilst it is true that the UK was cavalier going into the lockdown too late and holding mass events that drew Covid-19 sufferers into the country for a big football match and Cheltenham. They are only now starting with serious contact tracing using poorly trained novices.
They fired all the experienced local contact tracers nearly a decade ago to cut overheads. Improvements in food hygiene meant that there wasn't any perceived need for them (until now).
So what. "Essentially forever" is until we have a vaccine or an effective a nti-viral drug. It might take a year, perhaps two, to get something that so lves the problem, but the places that stopped the epidemic early have about a hundred times fewer deaths than places that didn't, and that difference looks like in creasing with time until we do get an effective vaccine or an ti-viral.
You don't have to. South Korea never did, and Australia is coming out of lo ck down right now. It's a false dichotemy.
Wow. No sexually transmitted diseases? It's going back a bit, but one episo de of the UK TV series "A very peculiar practice" was all about contact tra cing. The old sexual diseases are mostly easier to cure than they were, but antibiotic resistant strains do make life difficult still.
If it is anything like how they did private security for the London Olympics I expect the army will be landed with sorting out in about a fortnights time. I had an interesting inside view of the cordon.
Poor sods were not properly equipped at all and summer thunderstorms left them shivering wet and looking like drowned rats. Police and army in their full foul weather gear looked on with some amusement as did I.
had an episode on contact tracing, and it shouldn't have been impossible for actors to have been fed into the chat rooms to act a pretend patients to be practiced on.
It's not as if the UK hasn't had contact tracers in the recent past. There must be people around who have done the job and could be pulled in to talk about it - and role play representative sorts of patients - to augment the training process.
Whoever is taking the government's money does seem to be doing the bare minimum they could get away with, as opposed to making any kind of attempt to do the job properly.
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