Itsallaguess wrote:But eventually that pre-19th-July surge in Delta cases, mostly school-term and Euro-induced in it's latter stages, came up against the strong wall of, by then, vaccine-imposed UK resistance, as well as against the wall of 95% of people that are still voluntarily behaving themselves properly in the appropriate social situations anyway...
And here we are...
I don't think it's correct to say that the post-19th-July improvements show that people 'could always be trusted', given that we're in a completely different vaccine-induced situation in the UK now.
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The school term and Euros were well flagged in advance. The modellers knew about them. Yet their models did not predict the drop in infection from around the 19th July. Quite the opposite!
The vaccine status of the UK hasn't changed that significantly over the past few weeks, and anyway, like the schools and euros, it's something the modellers will already have been well aware of to take into account in their models - certainly the SAGE modellers should have access to the expected delivery dates and what appointments there are in the system (I couldn't book my first jab without also booking my second at the same time; albeit the NHS have now cancelled my second jab and the only new appointment I could get is now a few weeks later ).
And those models were predicting, iirc, something like 100's of thousands of cases going into august. I would hope and presume the modellers making those assumptions were well aware of the efficacy and roll out of the vaccines.
Itsallaguess wrote:I think it's fairer to perhaps say that given the vaccine-induced situation in the UK now, there's enough trust in the general population that much of their COVID-protocol behaviour can now *be* voluntary, rather than written in law, because it makes much less of a difference now, when it is voluntary, than it did when it needed to still be written in law....
But the problem you've got is that infection rate declined over the space of a few weeks from when Boris made it clear he was going ahead and relaxing restrictions anyway, even as the rate of infection was already rising rapidly. This led to people believing that the government was now washing its hands of responsibility.
Here's a good example of what I mean...
"The latest numbers are terrifying, but when aren’t they? Unlock next Monday, as is now the plan, and the third wave will apparently peak in August, but it will be different from previous peaks, in that there will be no action taken to ameliorate it" https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/bo ... 83434.html
This is exactly why I believe the perception regarding responsibility shifted on to the public, compared to earlier in the pandemic.
I believe that that - the shift of responsibility from government to individuals - is the primary driver as to why infection rates made such an abrupt about turn for the better.
Clearly the models being touted prior to the 19th warning of 100's of thousands of cases going into August, have been considerably off.
And these are models from the scientists who the government (up until this point) had allegedly been following when deciding to implement mandatory lockdowns, etc.
I think it's a very valid question to ask - how did they get it so wrong?
These same modellers were almost being treated like rock stars at the beginning of the pandemic ... their names and predictions front page news, and being used to justify a whole host of legally mandated restrictions on people's liberties.
I will acknowledge the Prof Ferguson did actually agree with the 19th July opening up ... at the same time, he was predicting up to 200,000 cases per day... though that was precisely because he had factored in the vaccine take up, and modelled that those cases wouldn't translate into a high number of deaths. ( https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politic ... 44295.html )
But in the earlier lockdowns (pre-vaccine), where the number of cases was determining the number of deaths, I feel it's very important that we now understand why this latest model was so dramatically wrong footed after 19th July in terms of number of cases....
What was missing from their models - clearly something very substantial was, and likely still is, missing from their models.
And that something clearly led to an unexpected, but very welcome fall in cases seemingly paradoxically at a time when restrictions have been lifted, and which would have been expected, according to the models, to increase, rather than decrease the rate of infections.
If some as-of-yet-unknown / unexpected factor could not just slow down, but completely reverse the rise of infections, wouldn't we want to fully understand this in case of future pandemics?
If it wasn't, paradoxically, the removal of restrictions that led to such a dramatic fall in cases, then whatever it is would not only need to explain how it caused such a dramatic fall in cases, but also how it has managed to do so at a time when relaxing of restrictions would then (so the argument goes) have been presumed to be driving a rise in cases at the same time. That's quite an (alleged) head wind for that factor to have come up against.
That must be one heck of a unknown factor, if it wasn't paradoxically the removal of restrictions (human behaviour) that itself caused the unexpected drop vs the expectations from the models.