Shifty, I was thinking in particular of the "herd immunity" policy...
The plan was to flatten the curve and deal with the disease at a rate the medical services could cope with.
..which meant that we didn't lockdown earlier in the pandemic. Whichever way you slice it, this will have led to tens of thousands of additional infections in the UK and many more deaths...
But that wasn't known, and a really early lockdown would have to have been with a view to eradicating the disease, meaning an absolute lock-down. As it is, there's no plan to eradicate the disease but to do like Asia and reduce it to small numbers than can be contained through testing and localised isolation.
- probably thousands. It was an incredible risk for a new virus which we knew so little about
Very debatable. We have loads of info on viruses and it makes sense to assume this isn't some alien disease that'll behave differently. That may make sense now, but at the beginning of this year, any rational person would look at the outbreak of a new virus and expect it to operate exactly the same as every other virus, that has been successfully contained. If the UK have gone full lock-down earlier and it turned out this was another SARS, it'd have been the wrong choice.
- we still don't even know if herd immunity will work as there is no evidence yet that those who have recovered have immunity!
We can't make policy based on worst-case hypotheticals. There's plenty of evidence that 'herd immunity' works - several hundred thousand years of humanity evolving to live alongside countless viruses. All common sense tells us the same will happen again. Even if not, lockdown for a month every time there's a case of Covid19 in the world is totally unsustainable.
It seems obvious that we didn't put the resources into contact tracing - the government didn't even get thousands of local environmental health officers to contact trace, even though this is something they are trained to do!
Again, that's in hindsight. At the time, the 300 people used were adequate for 'containing' the disease. They contact traced all those that the handful of +ve infections were in contact with. there was lots of testing and it found all those in contact testing negative. That is, one guy tests positive, they tested a hundred people and none showed infection, suggesting limited spread. That's the real data they had. Unbeknownst to them (and everyone else) there were people without symptoms who no-one anywhere in the world would have been contact tracing, because they were Covid19 invisible. That led to the first unexplained case, the guy in Haslemere, who obviously got it from an asymptomatic spreader. No amount of contract tracking could have stopped this.
With the WHO pleading for every country to contact trace and test out in the community as much as possible, it's likely to prove a severe failing from the UK.
At this point it makes little difference because everyone's in lockdown. Any new cases are likely to be from incubation before lockdown. The only people who need to be traced are those still in motion such as the politicians. When people leave lockdown, then testing and contact tracing become essential in allowing the population to live normally while containing the virus, but it only works because of the new insight into how this disease is different from the usual.
Putting it another way, the moment any new disease is recovered, a country could engage a Fear First response - boarder lockdowns, everything shut down, until the problem is passed. That'd be very damaging to the nation and completely unnecessary 9 times out of 10. That such a policy may have been beneficial with this disease doesn't make it the right policy to adhere to, and no-one could have known the right policy in this case.
There's still the debate about the actual impact - yes, people will die, but people die all the time. On the other hand, we also have the fallout from the economic collapse to deal with and possible other effects including escalated political tensions. So even if closing everything sooner would have saved lives, in five years time when people are looking back on this, the discussion may even have turned to 'we should have let the old and sick people die as we'd be better off than we are now.' Especially for the UK that still has Brexit to worry about. Perhaps doing nothing and having all the fat, middle-aged businessmen and crusty old people die off would have 'cleaned house' while the economy remained the only active one in the world and resulted in a healthier, leaner society and a new period of decades-long prosperity? No-one can possibly know, only theorise, and then make best-guess choices, and then live with the consequences. As long as one doesn't pick Dumb, like burning 5G towers, then one can't be held accountable for things not turning out for the best.
