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Originally Posted by Hugh
Not as badly as yours, it seems, as there is nothing in that article regarding "extremely small cohort" of long COVID (or at all), and the data was from February, before the Delta Variant struck…
Anyhoo, back to our home-grown Kent Variant - I’m interested in your reasoning of why the Kent Variant overcame peoples’ "common sense"?
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I think the general point was more that restrictions and what people were doing was probably more likely to have carried on working with the 3 tier system and whatever mitigations we had. (Which I don't agree is correct, I'll go into that later). But when we had the new variant which let's not forget took control in what people would call "lockdown" (even though we were under some form of such from March all the way to this July) and then spread over December pretty much unchecked in the SE and then over the whole country due to Christmas mixing and then the whole country basically being put in tier 4, then took some while of lockdown to get down again. So the "commonsense" measures had to be replaced by something formal because they didn't work. But this wasn't anyone's fault really I don't think let alone Johnson's and I don't really agree with the suggestion anyway.
But let's be clear here. Lockdown I and subsequent easing did work, it worked without masks, it worked with staying at home, thinking of others, and keeping your distance when you were out. We weren't doing so much testing then, but correlate to hospitalisations and then look at the rough proportions we did get it under control but then allowed foreign holidays. So it spiked again in Europe and people brought it back. That stage perhaps shouldn't have been allowed, we then get the spike of younger people who'd been away going back to school, university, work etc.
These autumn measures from last year look very similar to what slippery slope some think we should go down now, in that they were never going to control it.
So we had masks in shops in July, about 2 weeks after a lot had opened (but not freely - we still had distancing, and a lot of things like singing in churches was restricted to defined groups only, this only got lifted this July), then rule of 6 from early September, which was never going to work, which then became the lowest tier, no way that was going to keep anything in check because there was no herd immunity (nowhere near) and no protection for a susceptible population, with no ability really to get a test either. Tier 2 restrictions were probably not enough either, given that the main restriction on there was banning indoor mixing entirely. Tier 3 didn't do much either other than cripple hospitality with the "substantial meal" rule. None of it worked, and even the tightened 2nd version led to a 4th tier going in front of it. It was also easy for them to escalate but there wasn't a clear motive to de-escalate - Nottm had the highest rate in the country when the universities went back, it calmed down there but then spread over the wider city area, so they were eventually going to put 4 areas of Notts as well as the city into tier 3, but then looking at the stats, they then put the whole county in instead, after some delay - if it's bad enough to consider it do it then and then add the rest later. Like red listing countries which was also too slow. In the mean time they had worked hard here to get the levels down but then Hancock wouldn't change it "in case it went back up" so the tiers basically became an excuse to add more restrictions on more areas until we had national stay at home again. It didn't work, and you can see the same dithering around and the same poking with no de-escalation with "Plan B". I think that even tier 1 was a lockdown of some sorts (face coverings, rule of 6, curfews on hospitality) and then you consider places like Leicester were never taken out of restrictions in July 2020 and then a lot of the NW was put under more later. It was also a bit vulnerable to political posturing from people like Andy Burnham - whose point about supporting affected businesses I totally agree with, but wasn't the time to argue with lives at risk. The situation is much different now, but yet we look to fart about with half-arsed measures which most of us are already doing.
Not to mention that I doubt in some cases even the "tier 4" controls would stop Delta quickly. Given the vaccines it does have to - within reason - be allowed to run its course a bit.