Lockdowns and logistics

Dr Rupert Beale, head of the cell biology of infection laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said he and his staff could see the benefit of going into lockdown as they tested for Sars-Cov-2 to support local hospitals.

"When we ran our first samples, at the peak of the first wave, nearly half were positive. Now we see perhaps one or two positive samples in a thousand," he said. "When Boris Johnson recovered sufficiently to address the nation on 10 May, he outlined a new approach: suppressing this virus, keeping R below 1.Finally, we were pursuing the correct strategy."

He said we now had the right mindset but the challenge facing us is greater than that faced by countries which locked down early.

"We have to turn tests around more quickly, and we must be able to persuade asymptomatic contacts [of those testing positive] to self-isolate," he said. "There is good reason to believe that mask-wearing will only have a substantial effect when most people wear one."

He said recent data from Public Health England showed that less than 10 per cent of the UK was immune to the virus.

"The great majority of us are still susceptible to this virus, and if we allow it to transmit easily between us we will see a second wave – possibly during the winter, where it may be even more deadly," he warned.

"If we get the next phase of our response – testing, tracing and isolation – wrong, our two remaining options are semi-permanent lockdown, or hundreds of thousands of deaths in an uncontrolled epidemic."

The Daily Express

Leo McKinstry asked whether, once the final death toll is known, lockdown caused more deaths than it prevented.

" It is already established government policy swerved violently from inadequate to panic-stricken around March 14," he said. "This was because the Government swallowed the prediction of one man that without total lockdown there would be a holocaust of over half a million casualties."

He said the first action when faced with an enemy was a rapid and accurate analysis.

"Get it wrong and nothing will work," he added, "Worse, it might even be counterproductive. That is the accusation now being levelled at lockdown."

He said the scientists all said different things and the Government listened to 'the scariest'.

"Of the previous pandemics the worst was Asian flu which ran through most of 1969 and spring 1970. When it finally faded we had lost 80,000 citizens," he said. "But we did not close down a single bar, restaurant, pub, corner shop, major industry, airline, hotel, public park or anything else. "

He said thousands of treatments for non-Covid illnesses had been cancelled and non-Covid deaths are mounting.

"We know our Covid deaths are 40,000. But have all the other causes plus non-Covid flu topped that figure? Have we been duped?"

The Scotsman

Professor Alan McKinnon, Professor Emeritus Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, said few people appreciated the 'extent, diversity and complexity of the supply chains that support modern life – until they fail, of course, as some clearly have during the coronavirus crisis.'

He said the World Bank rated the UK sixth in the world in terms of its logistics capacity and cited the supermarkets as a case in point with their ability to cope with panic buying and increased demand.

"It is in the health sector that the supply chain response has been woefully inadequate – the very place where logistical failures are a matter of life and death," he said. "Chronic shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE have exposed staff in hospitals, care homes and other essential services to serious risk of infection and, as a result, many people have died.

"Given the critical importance of logistics to the management of the Covid19 crisis it is odd that there is no specialist in this field on the government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE).

"Hopefully governments everywhere will be drawing more effectively on logistics expertise by the time a vaccine is available and the truly monumental task of distributing it globally begins."