An end of year COVID thread:

Sometimes a view of a complex world requires radical simplification. In the UK all public health measures have failed. This year we have seen as many deaths and as much sickness per head of population as states that did not intervene at all. While

people put in effort to stay at home and to keep others safe, every attempt was undermined. 10 months into the pandemic there is COVID everywhere. In London up to 1 in 30 people have it right now. The hospitals have run out of ventilators and are triaging patients, so those with

least chance of making it are being given only palliative care. If there was less disease around - or more medical staff and resources - many of those people's lives could be saved. Nobody has any idea about who is infected, where they were infected, and who they might have

already passed the virus on to. Few of those who are infected or who have been in contact with cases are isolating. Those that are isolating, do so at home with the expectation that they will infect those they live with. Having undertaken difficult measures to try to keep safe,

the public has now run out of energy, and no longer trusts the government. It is likely that further restrictions will be even less effective than all of those that have so far failed. Today over 80,000 people have died. There has been no public mourning, no public grief, and no

public outrage. Almost all of those deaths were unnecessary. They would not have died if the government, its scientific advisors, and the press had taken the correct steps. The would not have died if senior elements of the state had not decided that the pandemic was an

opportunity: to asset-strip, to sweep billions of pounds of government money into the pockets of their friends, and to kill off large numbers of older and vulnerable people whose care is otherwise costly to the country's finances. They gambled that the population would not mind:

that nobody would care about the mass deaths of older people and disabled people. They gambled that self-interested attitudes among the public in this country were so strong that in a situation that is bad for everyone, nobody would stop to notice those who were worse off. And

they were right: everyone (or most of everyone) just cared about their own little problems. They didn't even see the bigger picture - never mind intervening to change it. For the most part nobody cared, nobody mourned, and the pandemic raged on.

How did this happen? Firstly the

government showed no enthusiasm for public health (by that I mean measures that help people like me and you not to get sick.) Whenever they were forced to implement a measure they went on television and made a big show about how they didn't actually want to be doing it. In fact

it wasn't just a show: they didn't care about our health and didn't want to be doing it. There is not a single public health measure that the government has implemented without being dragged kicking and screaming into it. This should have been an opportunity for government to

lead the country by saving lives. Instead they put all their energy into convincing the public that they shouldn't really want the sorts of measures that save lives. They told people that lockdowns were a terrible limit on their freedoms (as opposed to a route to being free from

the disease). They told people they should all "get back to normal" even in a world where nothing was normal any more. They hated public health measures so much that they actively undermined the few measures that they were forced to undertake. The initial lockdown, planned for

twelve weeks, was ended three weeks early. Even within this lockdown, the government refused to shut all non-essential businesses. Up to 40% of the population continued to go out to work, where they infection continued to spread. When people were rightfully afraid to go into

indoor spaces together they literally paid people to sit inside restaurants, without masks. They made political decisions to reduce distancing from two metres to one metre. They reduced the isolation period from 14 days to 10 days to even seven days in some cases now. Public

health processes such as contact tracing and case isolation, which ought to have been at the heart of the government's response, were simply outsourced. A firebreak lockdown didn't happen when it was needed, leading to 25,000 deaths. Universities and schools were reopened with no

testing, no social distancing, no mandatory mask wearing in classrooms, and no new ventilation. Just as the government would not release figures on how many healthcare workers died in the first wave, today they refuse to say how many teachers have died from COVID since schools

and colleges reopened. Many of these problems were compounded by the media. Senior political journalists never questioned the government's actions. Instead, they simply sent out briefings that the government drip-fed them as though they were news. Senior health correspondents at

the BBC put out fringe COVID-denialist lines. Not a single major journalist took a global view, comparing Britain's response to other countries that were doing better, or offering scrutiny on dubious decisions. Meanwhile, the popular press rallied people against public health

measures. Tabloids made lockdown seem far worse than the massive amount of death and sickness that they were staving off. Headlines got people excited about getting out of restrictions, instead of the prospect of a country in which the restrictions had worked and there was less

disease to fear. Meanwhile, the right-wing press simply denied the existence of the virus or its dangers. They encouraged the government to take reckless decisions. The same was true of the political opposition who at no point scrutinised or challenged the government. And then

there were the scientists. Many were doing their best, but poor decisions were made. On the government's SAGE committee, instead of discussions about wide-ranging strategic responses to the virus (such as whether the virus needed to be completely suppressed, or whether it just

needed to be "managed") there was endless quibbling about whether or not masks are effective, or what role was played by aerosol spread. It turned out after months of discussion that the predictable results were true: masks work, and the virus spreads in the air indoors. All

the while the chance for strategic discussion had passed. Some scientists were caught saying terrible things too: in the early stages some went on TV to defend a strategy in which many people were just left to get infected. Another senior government health official argued that

the UK did not need to follow the WHO advice because we are a rich country. Unsurprisingly this led to more death and disease than in those countries that simply followed the advice.

Ultimately, though, the problem has been a strategic one. There were mistakes throughout. The

government believed from the outset - and continues to believe - that the best response is to keep as much of the country (and as much business) open as possible. Meanwhile it aims to "manage levels" of the virus, "so that the NHS is not overwhelmed." This strategy has proved to

be flawed: it has caused enormous amounts of death and disease, and has resulted in the UK having one of the worst economic impacts from the virus in the world. Case levels cannot be managed while the government insists on trying always to open everything at the earliest possible

moment. The few weeks of extra trading gained have been lost fivefold in the weeks lost to subsequent restrictions. Meanwhile, the government has consistently ignored the benefits of reducing the virus not to just NHS capacity, but to the lowest possible levels: in such a

situation it is possible to find, test, contact tracing and isolate all possible cases, meaning much more can return to some kind of normality.

All of this has been made significantly worse by a small group of lobbyists who - often posing as scientists - deny the seriousness

and severity of the disease. These figures, who in the UK have gathered around the website "Lockdown Skeptics" and have close links to the Spectator, as well as significant mouthpieces across the popular press, and links to international lobbies. Despite producing no actual

science - and not publishing peer reviewed papers - they have produced a narrative that has offered the government and the press plausible deniability. There is increasing evidence that the Prime Minister has remained under the sway of one of the more powerful voices in this

lobby, Carl Heneghan.

So what can be done? Unfortunately the answer is the same as what we have now known for 10 months. Where there is any level of uncontrolled community spread, everything needs to be locked down until there is none. When there are low levels of virus,

positive cases and their contacts can be supported through isolation (preferably away from their homes, so they don't infect others.) The truth is that throughout this whole situation, at any time the virus could have been reduced to near-zero levels with three months of strict

measures, through which the population was supported. The government could have even taken a month or two to prepare the population for this scenario.

It is unfortunate also that those struggling against the government's murderous negligence that they have got bogged down in

data. The more disease there is, the more numbers, graphs, and charts. Disputes have opened up about whether rates are high enough to justify this measure or that measure. The truth is that data is something of a blind alley, and it is more important to see the pandemic with a

crude, qualitative view: there is a pandemic with a high fatality rate and a high morbidity rate. It is highly transmissible particularly in indoor settings. We only have a few measures available to stop the spread: hygiene, massive reductions of contacts, and distancing when

contact is necessary. No indoor space with others is safe, but things are helped a bit with masks and ventilation. The only way infection numbers are lowered is if significant numbers of infected people do not pass on there infections to anyone else. Given the virus has an

incubation period of up to two weeks, this means giving people the means to stay apart from each other for two weeks at a time.

If there is one government strategy that should be completely challenged it is to do with testing. Since April the government has been obsessed with

trying to use tests to allow people to go to work or school. The attempt to use testing capacity to find negative results should have been a scandal: all tests ought to have been used, as intended, to find all cases, in order to isolate them from the rest of the population. Eight

months on we do not have a test that tells people that they are safe to go into dangerous situations. And yet the government still spends most of its energy promoting this as a solution, instead of trying to massively reduce the infection and the spread of disease.

Meanwhile people have been consistently deceived into believing that a negative test means you are not dangerous. The consequences of this are deadly. The more people who know this is just a lie, the better.