Tony M, I argue that covid-19 was not loose in the UK in mid December because we have seen that infection numbers double every three or four days; it would have been like Wuhan before mid January. The reason for corpses in the streets in Wuhan was that the hospitals overloaded; we’d have seen that in the UK as well if the government hadn’t been persuaded to change policy and impose lockdown on March 23. I find Imperial College’s CoVID-19 model to match the recorded cases and deaths very convincingly; check the rise in the first graph to see where we would have been heading without lockdown:
https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19estimates/#/details/United_Kingdom
Rapid mutation leading to many strains is usual for single-strand RNA viruses, since there is no redundancy / genetic replication correction mechanism.
The UK ran a pandemic simulation exercise in 2016. The result was that the UK was entirely unprepared. So of course it was covered up and ignored by the government, which serves capital not the people. Let’s not let them off the hook, eh? Ultimately it doesn’t matter where SARS-CoV-2 originated, the government response to it was hideous, disgusting:
– “…citing government scientific adviser Graham Medley, who said in an interview on Newsnight just last week that the UK’s approach was to allow ‘a controlled epidemic’ of large numbers of people, which would generate ‘herd immunity’. Medley suggested that, ‘ideally’, we might need ‘a nice big epidemic’ among the less vulnerable.”
Let’s take a moment to consider what that would have meant. When covid-19 kills it does so horribly; days of agonising struggle for breath until, usually, the heart fails under the strain of trying to compensate for lack of oxygen from the lungs. Covid-19’s spread can be slowed down by lockdown, but over time just as many people will need critical care. But without lockdown all (say) 500,000 will need it in the course of just one month, but with only 5000 places available nationally 99% of them are not going to get it. Twice as many will die than if care were available, but all will suffer horribly whether they eventually die or not. Many, living alone, would be left to care for themselves, but being entirely incapacitated would be unable to do so. The government policy amounted to torturing hundreds of thousands of people, half or more of them to death, many of them alone and slowly starving, all for the sake of the economy. At least in hospital their last days can be made comfortable after a long and productive life. With proper personal protective equipment that the government refused to invest in, their last days could be social as well.