A commenter on the previous thread asked me to publicise the petition on the UK parliament website calling for the UK to implement an Italian-style lockdown, and I’m happy to do that – you can sign the petition HERE. I know there might be a debate over whether now is the time for a full lockdown or merely for a French-style ‘lockdown-lite’, but regardless of whether you agree with every dot and comma of what the petition organiser is calling for, I think it’s still very worthwhile to sign. It’s a good way to demonstrate the strength of feeling against the UK government’s reckless and dangerous decision to completely disregard the recommendations of the World Health Organization on how to tackle this outbreak.
It’s worth stressing that although the WHO acknowledge that lockdowns can play an important role when the situation has spiralled out of control, they don’t think lockdowns are sufficient. The most important thing of all is to interrupt the transmission of the virus by detecting every case and tracing all close contacts. So even if the government agree to a lockdown (or more likely are forced into it by an Italian-type catastrophe), a second U-turn would then be needed – because they’ve essentially given up on testing-and-tracing. They’ve announced that in future only hospital admissions will be tested, which means that mild cases will be completely missed and the close contacts of those people will continue spreading infection still further. The excuse given for this crazy decision is that the world gave up on containment when the virus spread beyond Asia and that a mass epidemic is now inevitable. Which is an odd claim, because the WHO are loudly repeating day in, day out, that this is a controllable pandemic and that every country can and must pull out all the stops to control it in the way that China and South Korea have demonstrated is entirely possible.
If this situation wasn’t so unutterably tragic, it would almost be laughable. The people who deliver pious lectures about “following the science” are the ones who are blithely ignoring the pleas of the world-leading experts of the WHO, and yet they seem oblivious to that irony. Instead they’re putting all their faith in a handful of UK scientists who are firmly in the minority of international scientific opinion. And let’s be frank – the Scottish government are as guilty of that as anyone.
