Quote:
Originally Posted by tweetiepooh
Don't forget that if you've lost someone that's one too many regardless of the stats.
Covid is/was a novel virus. It was bound to cause problems both medically and epidemiologically as we had no natural immunity either as individuals or as a society.
The far east was badly hit by the 18/19/20 flu epidemic hence the tendency there to mask up in flu season. Was that due to it being bad flu or that their population was more susceptible? Maybe both, that flu killed a lot of people worldwide.
The problem is that we can't go back and try again with different approaches much though a number of "residents" of Westminster may wish they could. The approach taken was likely the sensible one given what was known at the time and the effect it did have on health services.
Going forward is going to be interesting. How will the next variant present? How do we deal with that? Remember the concern about household pets being vectors? Dogs are easy but cats? What would happen if cats were shown to be an unaffected vector? Vaccinate all the cats? Cat masks? Isolate your moggie? What if some "cute" wild critter was a vector? Imagine the outcry if need to cull off hedgehogs/voles/otters?
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Flu does kill people. But there are vaccines, and the issue is usually pre-empted well enough by vaccinating those at risk of complications if they do get flu. We didn't get that with covid and even now the vaccines are still playing catch up as they were designed for viruses with far less mutated spikes than now.
Hindsight is great and I'm sure a few would have their own ideas how to deal with it. But I think generally speaking they have tried to keep things open as much as possible whilst keeping the virus under control at hospitalisation level.
The first lockdown made perfect sense as we had little idea about the virus at all, but knew it was dangerous enough to be an issue from Italy. However, after then wiping it out to lower numbers they then decided to open up foreign holidays without much control which brought it back. The tiers were a bit of a waste of time (presumably they didn't think people might leave the tiers if the next town had pubs open and they didn't) but again seemed to be down to keeping things open as much as possible. Locking down for Alpha made sense and the lockdown along with vaccination brought the virus down but I think there they might have been a bit slower to open up, and for various reasons, chose to then open up after Delta had come in, which seems to be right. Plan B measures I'm not sure actually did anything much, but at least avoided the Goves etc wanting more...