At the time the media were happy enough with it.
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DO I think there's accurate reporting? Not generally, no.
Peston is the biggest example I can give. Back in the day, yes some journos wpuld become high profile but they never forgot the story was the main selling point, not them. Everything Peston says, does, is aimed at promoting Peston the brand. Come out with stuff quickly disproven? The apology / retraction receives only a fraction of the publicity / retweets of the original claim.
When the deputy CMO utterly destroys a Peston claim, he immediately turns it to him, how he "was slightly taken aback at the ferocity of the Deputy Chief Medical Officer’s response. My view has always been that we should respect experts but not assume they are always correct. And that matters more than ever when so many lives are at stake."
It's sensationalism.
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The UK government didn't really take any action until March 12th/13th and from then on increasingly ramped up firstly weekly and then day-by-day to where we are now. The rough suggestion being that starting one week earlier could have massively improved our circumstances.Quote:
a simplistic analysis of the (imperfect and insufficient) data available: With caution, given the uncertainty in diagnosed cases, the epidemic appears to have grown at ~17% per day in the UK (similar to Italy 14 days before) the week before the lockdown, despite the calls for social distancing. This suggests that a lockdown was very important. It also suggests that a lockdown one week earlier could have led to an epidemic ~3 times smaller (likely translating into many thousands fewer deaths and the need for a shorter and less disruptive lockdown).
Cases offer a distorted picture due to limited testing.
https://twitter.com/imartincorena/st...96648040374272
I think people are becoming complacent aswell. Be it boredom or stubbornness but I get the impression not everyone is on board yet.
We’re still on exactly the same trajectory as Italy 14/15 days behind, all be it Lombardy has taken the brunt of it but look at London.
It’s going to get stricter in the next week or so.
Your workplace (with it's supposed contacts in areas that happen to be hotspots for the virus) is hardly unique.
Practically everyone who could work from home was working from home by the Monday before schools closed.
It was very obvious that the schools would close Friday with most parents at home working. So, the UK avoided the Italy and Spain examples of kids being sent to stay with grand parents for a week or 2 before parents were kept at home.
Can you imagine if we'd closed down a week earlier? We'd still be seeing the same figures (because of incubation) and people would now be getting really fed up. We're already seeing it happen now, and we've only been in lockdown 10 days.
Not puppets dancing but they certainly haven't had all powers of decision making devolved to them, this was always a balancing act between the economic effect (shorter term and longer term) and lives lost given our level of preparedness. The cso or cmo doesn't make those decisions, they are employed by the people who do.
That is my way of explaining why we were out of step with the who and the majority of the world for so long. The only other explanation is that we aren't as good at this stuff as we think.
The right steps at the right time but still leaving us with a lack of testing equipment, a lack of ventilators, lack of PPE but a full Cheltenham Festival and Wales/Scotland 6 Nations only called off on 13th of March and not following UK government advice. These things all take time to obtain but we had warning with first UK case at end of January.Quote:
The Government script:
‘We’ve taken the right steps at the right time’
-Dominic Raab March 30
‘We’ve taken the right steps at the right time’
-Matt Hancock April 2
Paul Johnson: https://twitter.com/paul__johnson/st...50443411726336