I’m a co-operative fellow when it comes to doing one’s bit for the common good. I understood the importance of the lockdown in spring. I remain a team player as we approach autumn and the insidious approach of the inevitable second wave. But there is no escaping the fact that social problems require social solutions and social solutions require leadership. Pragmatic leadership that balances competing risks and delivers policy that can be both understood and reasonably implemented. Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives was a straightforward policy in early spring. The current set of restrictions seem designed to compete with Fermat’s Last Theorem for complexity. The difference between them being that the theorem was eventually solved. The government has simply lost the plot.
We have no leadership. Boris likes to invoke the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz. Alas, he and his partner in crime, Dominic Cummings, have looked a lot more Laurel and Hardy than Winston and George. The government has for months been hostage to events, reacting to circumstances that had long overtaken them rather than proactively setting out intelligent and intelligible plans in advance. Ministers jump from definitive policy to random U-turn like jittery smackheads trying to explain their activities in a police interview room.
You’d like an example? Let’s look at international travel. Like most countries, our borders were closed to all but essential travel in early spring. That was easy. Opening up again for tourism has proven a little trickier. Some countries have – thus far – done a better job of containing the virus than others, and the UK has opened air routes to those who’ve brought infection rates down to acceptable levels. Seems a sensible enough idea. Boris promised a traffic light system to assess the risk of each country, so that we might plan trips and keep the aviation and hospitality industries alive. Green for good, Red for no-go and Amber for….well, what Amber means has never been published. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amber turns out to be a list of places that don’t exist, such as Atlantis and Wakanda. Just in case they do exist. This is 2020 after all. No one knows anything for certain anymore.
The exact science for determining Green and Red seems a little subjective. Both in measuring the factors required to make the assessment and what the assessment means. In essence, while Red does mean no-go, Green seems to mean ‘maybe’ and/or ‘maybe not’. It can change in the blink of an eye. Which isn’t helpful when planning trips. If one returns from a country that is anything but Green, one must quarantine for 14 days. In practice, Grant Schapps, the Minister for Transport, issues his diktats each Thursday by Twitter. If you are in a country that has turned from Green to Red, you have 36 hours or so to return to the UK or else face a quarantine.
Mrs P and I flew out to Portugal last Sunday. Whilst Portugal had gone Green just a week before we travelled, it became apparent, as Portugal’s coronavirus cases increased, that the U.K. government would remove the country from the quarantine exemption list before our return. I monitored flight prices and infection rates earnestly and held off for as long as was sensible. But I bit the bullet on Wednesday, buying a ticket to fly back from Porto to London one day earlier than planned. I couldn’t afford to spend two weeks at home, off work and unpaid, in quarantine. The following day, the Transport Secretary announced the inevitable and those who did leave buying their quarantine avoidance ticket to the last minute were required to hand over three times the cash for a flight home than I did.
I can’t really grumble, I suppose. We flew out to Porto last Sunday well aware that the quarantine requirement was very likely to be reintroduced. We were just glad to be able to go at all. But here I am, writing this from a hotel room at Luton Airport, having arrived back on a ram-packed flight in time to avoid quarantine. I stayed here the night. I’m waiting for Mrs P to arrive back on our originally booked flight. She, being a person who is currently working from home and can afford to quarantine, stayed in Porto for the full duration of our holiday.
There is, of course, a huge irony to the whole process. You might have spotted it already. In a couple of hours I will meet Mrs P in Arrivals, we will go to our car and I will drive us home. She stayed a few hours more in Porto, but returned on a far quieter flight than I. Yet she will quarantine, whilst I mingle with the hot polloi at will. The rules and restrictions are meant to be about risk reduction, not elimination, whilst trying also to enable social and economic activity to continue as far as is practicable. But that is not what is happening.
It seems to me that it would be much better policy as far as risk reduction is concerned to allow travellers on one or two week trips to return as and when they originally intended. It allows for greater planning on our part, and avoids the crowded airports and flights that are the inevitable result of imposing short notice deadlines. It would also, of course, be better policy to use airport based virus testing to reduce or eliminate the need for quarantine. But that may be asking too much of a British government that has done little to suggest any meaningful level of competence at anything.
And besides, quarantine isn’t particularly onerous. Not in a practical sense. Whilst one is meant to stay indoors 24/7, there are permitted exceptions, as detailed by Her Majesty’s government. If you feel your eyes need testing, you can of course go on a long drive to a beauty spot for a day out. Also, you are allowed to break the quarantine law at any time and for any reason that suits you, provided that you do so in a very specific and limited way. This might sound crazy. But this is the consequence of political leadership that ignores the concept of consequence.
Any questions?
The Mexile 
I think the blog was great. You did a very good job on reporting about your own personal experience and made it a learning experience for all. I love the photograph.
We here I Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico are are permanent Red. I expect that it will remain that way for the foreseeable future since no one seems to care. The government has the same rules but few are following them. So we are into a vicious Red cycle.
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Good description of the problem. I have seen similar coronavirus absurdities in Oregon. My libertarian side fingers a different aspect of governmental villainy, though. It is not the leaders; it is the belief that government is very good about doing anything other than blowing things up.
If the world governments (the very phrase makes me cringe), had simply handed the virus management over to Elon Musk or better yet his Marvel alter-ego Tony Stark, we might still have a pandemic, but we would fully understand what we were being asked to do, why we should do it, and why it all would make manifest sense.
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I’m of the mind that leadership of either elected or private enterprise varieties are not the answer in the west. And the people they are supposed to lead are equally to blame. Lockdown was never a solution. It was a tool to minimise the initial losses whilst buying time to put longer term solutions/barriers/policies in place. It seems to me that most countries have squandered that time. The UK more than most, as we have a government which is still prioritising the act of wreaking economic carnage on the country through a self destructive Brexit policy.
There’s one interesting point to look at. We currently have restrictions in place that pretty much equal Sweden’s light touch policy. It may be the best we can do from this point on given that so much time has been wasted. Would we have been better to follow their example from the start? Given that infection rates are increasing exponentially again, the answer is ‘probably not’.
I always found it puzzling that some people felt that the Swedish model was the way forward based simply on the ‘shape’ of their infection curve. The curves of Sweden’s model, the UK model and a mass extinction event killing all human life on the planet are all rather similar. One really needed to compare Sweden to a similar model that employed a different set of policies, and use the numbers, rather than the shape of the infection curve.
We will emerge from this Age of Plague with a clearer picture of what happened and how to react to future pandemics. And we might have to face the uncomfortable reality that we either choose mass deaths of the citizenry, or tolerate an unpleasant authoritarian regime. With fingers crossed that it’s just a temporary regime….
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I’m with you one governments’ ability to do anything right. They alway manage to mismanage things. But I am not willing to have Musk or some other genius entrepreneur do it either. I like you comments.
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And it is really a version of “1984” The Pandemic is mild. It kills the old and the co-morbid. Could you imagine the world shutting down because people are dying of cancer!!! People are dying of heart attacks!!!
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Nothing I’ve written should be interpreted in any way to suggest that I think Covid-19 is in any way mild, or that social restrictions of any sort are unnecessary. The novel coronavirus might not be the Spanish Flu, but at its peak a few months back it was the worlds number one killer, putting even malaria down the list. Without any social restrictions it would likely be killing more people that cancer, heart attacks and malaria all put together. Heart attacks and cancer aren’t contagious. It’s also worth bearing in mind that whilst the elderly are the worst affected, over half the population of the US have conditions that would be considered a ‘co morbidity’, and that (in the U.K., and likely elsewhere) up to 5% of victims suffer long term sickness, injury and/or disability.
And the current U.K. government is definitely not a reproduction of Orwell’s famous novel. Iraq’s favourite political spin doctor of the early noughties, Comical Ali, would feel right at home in Whitehall, dispensing nonsense to try and hide the incompetence. Trump, on the other hand, most definitely looks like a farcial reinterpretation of 1984.
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Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States each and every year according to the CDC.
When do we shut down?
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Shut down? This post isn’t about shutting anything down. Smoking, coronavirus, or anything else. It’s about reducing risks in a sensible way that allow life to continue as far as practical. But bringing up smoking is a very good to demonstrate my point.
Cigarettes do indeed cost up to 480,000 lives every year. Which is why there are so many restrictions in place. You can’t smoke wherever you like, for example. Although smoking isn’t contagious, second hand smoke almost functions in that way. Hence the restrictions on where you can smoke. High taxes are aimed at discouraging smoking. Public health campaigns are run at great expense to help people quit.
The coronavirus has in six months likely killed more people that cigarettes over the same time period once the inevitable undercount has been factored in. And that is with some pretty heavy duty lockdowns and restrictions put in place. Without them? You might have lost a million already. Maybe more. And your health care system would have collapsed in many parts of the country a long time ago. These are not outlandish claims, but reasonable evidence based estimates.
Given the facts, smoking, as deadly as it is, is not in the same ball park as the coronavirus.
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Frankly, it’s absurd that they aren’t testing in airports of all places. And a 14 day quarantine is equally ridiculous. Seems like maybe a few days quarantine followed by a test, which if negative, should be the end of it. The standard PCR test is so sensitive that it would catch everyone under such a routine.
There is a technological development that could more or less put an end to this ridiculousness and this pandemic, at least to the extent possible via tests. That is the rapid, paper-strip based tests developed by some scientists at Harvard and elsewhere. (see rapidtests.org for more info.) These tests, while not as sensitive as the now-standard PCR tests, need no machinery. You simply wet them with your saliva, wait about 10 minutes, and they change color to indicate if you are infectious or not. No, they don’t catch you while in the incubation phase, but then you aren’t contagious in the incubation phase. But these tests are cheap, a few dollars a pop, and could literally be deployed everywhere — nursing homes, schools, restaurants, convention centers, airports, etc. With widespread adoption, these tests could become a game-changer by allowing normal activities to continue while ensuring that infectious people are kept away from the well. They are cheap enough that we could deploy literally billions of tests, making regular testing for all a reality.
The drawbacks? Governments would have to give up on knowing the absolute numbers of positive tests. Obviously restaurants and bars can’t reasonably be expected to do disease reporting. I understand the desire to maintain consistent records, but it seems like the good of massive, rapid testing would outweigh the bad of lower quality data on infections and cases. But, I’d have to assume that almost anyone who is declared positive by, say, a restaurant, would likely seek additional care and thus be counted anyway. And if this sort of testing regime were widespread, such persons would get stopped at the next bar or restaurant, so they’d have little choice but to stay home and get well.
Why governments aren’t focusing on this now is an utter mystery to me. The current testing regime is too slow, expensive, and cumbersome to really deal with the problem as it now stands. Rapid tests could solve this problem and I, for one, am extremely disappointed it’s not being pursued with more vigor.
Saludos,
Kim G
Boston, MA
Where I’d have to quarantine for 14 days after coming back from anywhere outside New England plus NY and NJ.
P.S. There also seems to be some talk now that the PCR tests are TOO sensitive, e.g., generating positive results for folks who no longer have active infections, but only viral remnants.
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It’s always been the case that the solution to the pandemic was either in a cure, a vaccine or a reliable near instant test programme. And frankly, the test route always seemed to me to be the most certain of the bunch to come to fruition. The Univeristy of Southampton has been working on quick turnaround saliva tests for months. I assume these are similar to the ones you mentioned. The Chinese have similar tests good to go. I can’t claim to know why these aren’t the default testing method yet. I’m sure there’s a logical reason. But the sooner we can get entire populations mass tested regularly, the sooner we can get to grips with things.
And there are an increasing number of airports in Europe which are doing exactly what you suggest. Test on arrival, a few days of quarantine and then another test. The U.K. govt has taken the position that this won’t capture all cases coming back into the country. And of course it won’t. But providing we reduce the number of infectious cases by a goodly amount, we should be able to cope. London is the number one global transport hub, and they are killing it.
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Indeed. One could forgive early, hasty, and thus inept responses. But here, six months into the crisis and the responses are still ham-handed and not wildly effective? No good! Cheers.
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