With respect, you are hearing the advisors each day on TV say what they think.
You are listening to oxford and imperial disagreeing with each other profoundly. Their models are based on vapour for data, No surprise there for anyone that ever worked in Or with academia , disagreement is SNAFU
We have the editor of lancet who doesn’t agree with himself. Still he demands to criticise.

We have the swedes going left, the South Koreans going right , opting to kill their population all later and every shade in between. All of them seemingly taking medical advice.

The government cannot take contradictory advice, go left and right at the same time,

Testing needs validation before use. Easy to say. Hard to do. That is not quick, so smartarses can say test everyone, but translating that into policy is a serious problem. The temperature gauges in use at some airports are a chocolate fire guard. Tests cannot validate without sick people! And worse it can be assymptomatic so who do you test?

The fact is none of them know but all of them want the right to argue against others advice.

If all the medics agreed Johnson would know which way to go, but they dont!
So he took a decision, Someone had to, for which he deserves support.








Quote Originally Posted by Graham Breeze View Post
I don't think we know what the "closed doors" medical advice was. And I don't think the medics. decided anything. And anyway, as you say, it was not necessarily consistent advice.

We do know what the medics have been allowed to say (valuing their future careers and funding for their institutions) and we would certainly be right to believe that the key decisions have been political and not primarily medical.

So a medical view might have been to, say, test/quarantine every traveller into the UK from an early date and then isolate and trace; but at that time that would have been politically unacceptable because the public had not recognised and accepted the potential danger of a disease in far away countries. "Loss of civil liberties..." etc etc

If with hindsight the economy had then not been trashed and not many people had died compared with Italy and Spain and the USA; then Johnson would have been a hero (and rightly), but, but, but if things had not been as catastrophic as we now see they are then Johnson would have been vilified and etc.

My brother and family live in Pamplona (Northern Spain) and the city is effectively under martial law. There is no popping out for exercise there but Spaniards who remember living under a dictatorship have accepted loss of freedom in ways that people in the UK have still not - even now.

The cost per life saved under Covid-19 is far, far higher than the equivalent in normal times. It has been a political decision to spend that money because the public would not like to face the reality of the pragmatic decisions Doctors normally take every minute of the day. And Johnson would like to be re-elected.