The daily numbers, especially today’s, are not giving any cause for optimism whatsoever.
I’m increasingly convinced that we urgently need a circuit-breaking lockdown.
But business interests do not want it, and it looks as if business interests are going to prevail.
For the most probable consequences of this, see what happened in the UK when Johnson’s government prevaricated about locking down in the first weeks of escalating spread last year.
As Johnson’s former special adviser Dominic Cummings testified in the House of Commons yesterday, the consequence of a 3-week delay in the imposition of the UK’s first lockdown was that “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die.”
On the plus side for us, we have a better tracing system than the UK, though there’s reason to be concerned about it struggling to cope with rapid and widely dispersed spread of the virus. We also have far better border controls, the biggest plus point in our favour, together with substantially better arrangements for quarantine and home isolation.
On the minus side, we have much lower testing capacity, and we’re contending with a far more infectious variant of Covid.
I agree with Ko-P that there are only two ways to effectively put a lid on this outbreak before it overwhelms the health system: either mass vaccination or a prompt, hard lockdown. And since we don’t have anywhere near enough vaccines for mass vaccination, and are at least months away from any hope thereof, we need to bite the bullet and go into a strict nationwide lockdown.
A lockdown need not bring a full stop to the most important areas of economic activity. Given the massive importance of the semiconductor industry, priority can be given to keeping it in operation as fully as possible by allowing its employees to continue going to work as essential workers, with appropriate arrangements made to maximize their protection from the virus and minimize the risks of it being spread in their places of work.
If we don’t have a circuit-breaking lockdown forthwith, we’re more than likely to need a much longer and more damaging lockdown later on, when many lives will already have been lost, many people made severely ill, many livelihoods destroyed, many other damaging effects sustained, which could have been prevented by an early lockdown.
