I won't reproduce all of this article which appears in The Sunday Times today. It is in large part damning of the approach taken in the UK.
Coronavirus: did Britain get it wrong in the battle to stop the spread?
Everything you need to know about the scientific efforts to tackle Covid-19
As the fight to suppress the coronavirus pandemic grew ever more urgent last week, a two-year-old video clip from a literary festival in Wales posed an awkward question for officials still scrambling to stem the tide of infection. In May 2018 a prominent professor at Edinburgh University predicted with uncanny precision how the next major threat to UK health would evolve.
Someone in China would become infected by an animal, Devi Sridhar, the university’s professor of global public health, told an audience at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye. Then they would get on a plane to Britain. If a specialist as well connected as Sridhar saw the coronavirus coming two years ago, why were we not better prepared?
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During a discussion of government preparedness for serious health threats, Sridhar argued for a global collaborative approach. “The largest threat to the UK population is someone in China who has been infected from an animal,” she declared. “Then they get on a plane to the UK. What good is it for the UK to be worried [only] about what’s happening here? It’s about those interconnections across the world. If you want to solve those problems, you can’t do it on a go-alone approach.”
Like many other parents, Sridhar, 35, took her two children out of school last week and began working from home, where she talked at length about the insight that surfaced on that Twitter clip. She and other experts also discussed the government’s sudden change of strategy in what many consider a long-overdue effort to slow transmission of the virus and prevent the collapse of the NHS.
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“I hope I’m not being overly critical,” Sridhar said, “but this is not the first virus to emerge from this kind of setting and many things have been done in a way they should not have been done. We should not have been this surprised.”
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Sridhar complained on Thursday. “I still don’t fully understand who the government is listening to and what is the goal.”
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For Sridhar the first big missed opportunity came in late January when The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, published its first account of the treatment of coronavirus patients in Wuhan. “I remember seeing that first paper and, excuse my language, I was like, ‘Oh shit,’” Sridhar said. Her old prediction was about to become horribly true. “At that point we already knew the virus was going to come [to Britain] and all we could do was buy time. What we really needed was to get testing in place. But we didn’t really respond.”
The next “sobering” moment was a report by a WHO mission that had travelled to China to study the virus. The report, published on February 24, reached two crucial conclusions: first that the impending pandemic was “extremely dangerous” and “can be a devastating virus”; the second was that China had resorted to what Bruce Aylward, leader of the mission, referred to as “the most ambitious . . . agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history”. The Chinese took “old-fashioned” measures such as hand-washing and mask-wearing, and “turbo-charged” them with an “all-of-government, all-of-society” approach that included clearing giant hospitals to make way for virus patients, moving routine health services online and imposing drastic restrictions on movement.
“At this point here in the UK we just kind of sat back and waited,” Sridhar said. “At the time we should have been running simulations. How are we going to manage with 10 or 500 cases, where are we going to get ventilators, what about supply teams and tests? We have known about the clinical need from January.”
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Today we still don’t have enough masks and gowns for medical staff. I think it’s because [the planners] messed up.” Yesterday she added by tweet: “It makes me feel nauseous how little action was taken early on. Academic navel-gazing and political in-fighting instead of bold decisive action.”
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Yet a dramatic change of government strategy last week, finally embracing the shutdown measures adopted by other countries from the start, provoked howls of frustration from many who had been bewildered by Downing Street’s dithering about whether it might be better to allow the virus to spread so Britons acquired “herd immunity”.
“I can’t help but feel angry that it has taken almost two months for politicians and even ‘experts’ to understand the scale of the danger,” Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, tweeted on Tuesday. “Those dangers were clear from the very beginning. We have wasted seven weeks. This crisis was entirely preventable.”
Sridhar added: “We decided to take a different path to other countries, thinking we knew better. We should have been learning from other countries about breaking the chain of transmission, mass testing, tracing contacts. If we had started with the 25,000 tests a day they are promising only now, we would already be bending that curve [of transmission rate]. Every day that goes by [without government action] we need harsher and harsher measures.”
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Other scientists have long been vocal on the need for more rigorous social distancing. “The thing that is troubling me is the suggestion that the science has shifted,” said Professor Alan McNally of Birmingham University. “It has not. The transmission dynamics and infectivity of the virus has not changed at all. The trajectory of the epidemic has been very predictable if one pays attention to China, Italy, Iran, Spain.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-did-britain-get-it-wrong-in-the-battle-to-stop-the-spread-ffjvgq02c