No government is perfect, and no government is going to get away without criticism, what most most people ask is "Are they doing their best given the circumstances"
To date, that's probably the case.
However, there comes a point after the initial firefighting stages when you need to see some form of a plan emerge, and that time is certainly now. I'm wondering if the PM and special advisers are working on comprehensive strategy behind the scenes while he's out of the daily fray. I sincerely hope so.
Ultimately, this requires a restart of the economy whilst at the same time keeping a lid on the virus because a vaccine isn't coming any time soon.
If you want to manage something, you need to be able to measure it, and most importantly, measure it accurately. The current test doesn't give you a very good picture of what's happening because:-
1) Its been shown to give between 20-30% false negatives.
2) Its unclear if swab testing is being done correctly universally.
3) Its a spot test, and merely tells you the person is positive at the time
4) It doesn't work on people in the early stage of infection.
5) It doesn't work on superspreader asymptomatic people.
When you combine the reliability of the test with the already known shortfalls of the test, your test is probably no better than 50% accurate which means, in effect, you may as well guess as test.
The narrative of mass testing at the moment is a press obsession and missing its function which is to inform ACCURATELY what's out there and using that to manage it effectively.
What the government needs is a reliable test and it needs an infrastructure to deliver tests where it wants to do them. In doing that, Prat and Dick North do have a point, they will need to use local facilities either via local government or via local health boards.
To manage this, there's no point in testing people if you don't do anything with it, its merely a statistic. Therefore you need an action plan on the results.
Reports I've seen is that it takes a team of upto 100 people to "track and trace" contacts of a single positive case, I think that's probably excessive but I'll go with a personal estimate of 10.
If you have large scale testing, and each positive case requires 10 people to trace and isolate then its clear that you need the number of infections to be very low before any "track and trace" programme is going to be effective.
In addition, if you are going to have extensive track and trace, those people doing it are going to need a large supply of PPE to protect themselves and these people in themselves are a potential mobile infection source themselves.
Therefore, before any track and trace system can work, you will need the infection rate to be sufficiently low that its able to cope before you can reduce lockdown and the time from test to result needs to be very short.
However, that doesn't solve the problem, lets take a family of Husband, wife and two kids. The husband is a key worker and is currently going out to work and therefore more likely to be infected. If he gets infected, he takes it home to his wife and two kids.
If the wife comes out of lockdown, and the kids go back to school, now all 4 have the potential to pick it up and pass it on to each other and then pass it back to their workplaces and schools.
So any track and trace will therefore have to result in the lockdown of the entire household at the point of infectivity and therefore, that requires literally endless testing and co-operative lockdown in society of infectious cells.
To do that, you don't need track and trace, you need a 95%+ reliable test and the ability to do that test daily on everyone.
And sadly, we neither have a test of the accuracy required, nor do we have enough of them, and neither is there likely to be the availability to do daily testing of everybody.
And that I suspect is the conundrum and why we don't have a strategy.
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