Earlier lockdown could have prevented three-quarters of UK coronavirus deaths

[DeppityDawg]

Anyway - this thread was really not supposed to be about personality, so let's assume I've backed down and agree with you that the PM has done nothing wrong.  Do you have any proper data or proof that the real number of additional deaths from introducing lock down later is massively lower (less than 10,000 let's say)?

FFS, this is a circular argument that comes back to the same point every time, and you STILL don't get it. Ironically its YOU now whinging and writing things like  "Well, I never said that..." when I just do what you do and make my own conclusions about what you said. How does that feel? I think I''ll just keep using the "Javert" method of assuming I know what you meant and ignore what you say? How does that fecking feel?



For the umpteenth time. WHAT DATA OR EVIDENCE? TO SUPPORT WHAT? I'M NOT MAKING A FECKING CLAIM? None of us have any hard proof that 500,000 would have died or that 100 would have died. HOW MANY FECKING TIMES HAS THIS BEEN SAID NOW?



What do you NOT understand about what I am saying about this whole sorry mess? I and several other on here (as JoG illustrates above) are sceptical about these "models" which make claims like "500,000 will die if we do nothing". There are "experts" who are sceptical about them. How many times has this been said too? This was a "model" and there are "experts who disagree with it for feck sake, what is so hard to understand? This ISN'T SAYING "no one will die". This isn't saying "only 500 will die" What is it with you keep inventing motives or binary opposites because someone doesn't fecking agree with you? Do you understand how fecking annoying it is when you keep doing this? DO I have to write in capitals all the time to make my point because you don't read what other people say?



As you yourself have said a dozen or more times, this is a new disease, and we are to an extent working in the dark until we know more. The government (as with other nations) has been forced to make decisions based on expert advice, which is by the very nature of an unknown virus, driven to a very great extent by models and guesstimates. You appear to accept every thing the doomsday experts models and guesstimates say without question - others (because they know there will be other repercussions) DON'T accept them without question. That's the only difference between the PoVs

[johnofgwent]

If you want a straight answer to what I think of this plague and its modelling, check out what I just posted in beelbub's 'some sums' thread.  In short, I believe we will not have data of sufficient quality and robustness to properly model this disease for another 15 years and that almost everything so far is about as reliable as dividing the future in the entrails of animals butchered at the abbatoir

[johnofgwent]

I think you know that this is nonsense.  The immoral or wrong behaviour of an individual does not invalidate the accuracy of their technical scientific work.  



I guess you are suggesting that his behaviour showed that he actually knew his own model was completely wrong an the virus doesn't spread at all or what?



He had already had Covid-19 and, despite the reticence of scientists to confirm, about 99.9% sure to be protected given that he had only recovered literally days earlier.  Therefore he could not give it to her, and she could not give it to him even if she had it.  His decision was rational and safe based on science.  Unfortunately it was stupid based on the fact that he was in the public eye at the time and would be hunted to death by tabloid journalists desperately looking for hypocrites (they could probably look in the mirror as I have no idea how many lock down rules they are breaking by chasing down the home address of everyone who's ever been interviewed about Covid-19).



All the BS about not proven immunity and so on is mainly because they don't want the very huge number  of the population who have not had Covid-19 but have convinced themselves that they have had it, ignoring the lock down - it's behavioural science that they cannot officially state that people who have just recently recovered are at the last protected from symptoms even if not protected from a low level asymptomatic infection.



Anyway my point is - his actions don't in any way indicate that his original model was massively wrong.  Of course, it had confidence intervals so in that sense it was wrong, but as I keep pointing out like a broken record, these models are supposed to give order of magnitude estimates and not exact answers.



And by the way, Wagner's music sucks.



If it turned out that the person who invented the car seat belt refused to wear it himself, does that mean that the data indicating that they save lives in general is incorrect?



I guess the other question would be the usual conspiracy theory question - if his model was deliberately exaggerated, what was his motive for doing that?

I shall be most unusually terse.



I cannot accept that a man who proclaims this plague as serious as he has and who genuinely believes his words to be the complete truth would then behave as suicidally as he did if his findings were as bad as he said his model showed them to be.

[Javert]

In reply to the thread....



As the last line of javert's post says, 'all statistical models are rubbish'.



Indeed they are.



Perhaps the most pertinent, objective appraisal of the statistical model that I can possibly give is the fact that the guy who created it and 'calculated' that doing nothing would leave half a million bodies in the gutters promptly called up the slapper in an 'open marriage' to come round to his house and get a good seeing to despite him showing allbthe signs of having the virus, and that he called her up to come round for a second shagfest which he proceeded to enjoy despite her now showing these same symptoms.



I am entirely prepared to believe an arrogant bastard of the elite such as he would not think twice about spreading the pestilence if it interfered with his last chance of a decent screw before the lungs became so pus-filled it would make taking a piss a labour of Hercules, but the fact that he happily engaged in round two after HE had recovered but SHE now showed clear signs of having caught it speaks volumes .......

I think you know that this is nonsense.  The immoral or wrong behaviour of an individual does not invalidate the accuracy of their technical scientific work.  



I guess you are suggesting that his behaviour showed that he actually knew his own model was completely wrong an the virus doesn't spread at all or what?



He had already had Covid-19 and, despite the reticence of scientists to confirm, about 99.9% sure to be protected given that he had only recovered literally days earlier.  Therefore he could not give it to her, and she could not give it to him even if she had it.  His decision was rational and safe based on science.  Unfortunately it was stupid based on the fact that he was in the public eye at the time and would be hunted to death by tabloid journalists desperately looking for hypocrites (they could probably look in the mirror as I have no idea how many lock down rules they are breaking by chasing down the home address of everyone who's ever been interviewed about Covid-19).



All the BS about not proven immunity and so on is mainly because they don't want the very huge number  of the population who have not had Covid-19 but have convinced themselves that they have had it, ignoring the lock down - it's behavioural science that they cannot officially state that people who have just recently recovered are at the last protected from symptoms even if not protected from a low level asymptomatic infection.



Anyway my point is - his actions don't in any way indicate that his original model was massively wrong.  Of course, it had confidence intervals so in that sense it was wrong, but as I keep pointing out like a broken record, these models are supposed to give order of magnitude estimates and not exact answers.



And by the way, Wagner's music sucks.



If it turned out that the person who invented the car seat belt refused to wear it himself, does that mean that the data indicating that they save lives in general is incorrect?



I guess the other question would be the usual conspiracy theory question - if his model was deliberately exaggerated, what was his motive for doing that?

[johnofgwent]

In reply to the thread....



As the last line of javert's post says, 'all statistical models are rubbish'.



Indeed they are.



Perhaps the most pertinent, objective appraisal of the statistical model that I can possibly give is the fact that the guy who created it and 'calculated' that doing nothing would leave half a million bodies in the gutters promptly called up a slapper in an 'open marriage' hed been shafting on a regular basis to come round to his house and get another good seeing to despite him showing all the signs of having the virus, and that he called her up to come round for a further shagfest which he proceeded to enjoy despite her now showing these same symptoms.



I am entirely prepared to believe an arrogant bastard of the elite such as he would not think twice about spreading the pestilence if it interfered with his last chance of a decent screw before the lungs became so pus-filled it would make taking a piss a labour of Hercules, but the fact that he happily engaged in round two after HE had recovered but SHE now showed clear signs of having caught it speaks volumes .......

[Javert]

How many times in other threads Javert, when presented with alternative evidence and "experts" views, or anything that casts doubt on lockdown policy, have you then said "but this is a new disease, we still don't know blah blah". How many times have you defended the use of "models" in the absence of known facts and hard data on the virus because "we have to do something rather than nothing"? Now here you are waffling on about the PM resigning because one of these "models" (in retrospect let's not forget) is now BACK CALCULATING that X amount of people could have been saved if he done Y instead of Z. Talk about wisdom and hindsight. You just as well make him resign for not knowing it was going to rain. I expect some fecking "climate scientist" (at taxpayers expense) has a "model" for that though, don't they?



I stick by my conclusion that we won't know what the final toll in lives and economic damage is until this is past, and we have the data to compare excess deaths and the financial impact and suffering in the poorest half of the population.



And Captain Dynamic, I know it's fashionable for liberal lefties to sneer at Trump, I don't like him much either, but that's all political posturing. The democrats are all wonderful people of course, aren't they? :roll:  Fact is the world has to get back to work, and soon, with or without a vaccine, or there won't be an economy left to go back to. Those are the economic facts of life, and while increasing the debt mountain might make us all feel good about ourselves and what wonderful, caring people we all are, it won't make them go away.

But I never said that the PM should definitely resign now.  I said, if it's shown by the future public inquiry that he had all the information needed to make the decision to introduce the lockdown earlier, and he failed to act on that and dithered instead, when the correct decision would have saved thousands of lives, he should at that point resign.  If that's not how it came across, that's what I meant and I am happy to clarify it now.



I accept that we will not know that for sure for many months until we can get at least into Spring 2021.  



However what we do know, is that if the lock down had been introduced a week to 10 days earlier, and people had followed it pretty well, many thousands (highly like tens of thousands) of lives would have been saved up to this point in time (this is disputed by you but you've provided no rational evidence other than "all models can be wrong".  We'll wait to see if miraculously the UK ends up in a year from now with the lowest death toll of all due to the PM's genius but I hope you'll forgive me for not holding my breath.



It's about what were the grounds that the PM used to decide not to introduce lockdown immediately on 16th March or earlier - if he can justify that decision he will be fine.



Have you ever heard of "gross negligence manslaughter"?



You keep posting as if we are calling politicians murderers.  Nobody is claiming that Boris Johnson woke up one morning and said "before my bacon butty I'm going to deliberately murder 10,000 people".  



If the UK was a private company UK PLC, to show that the leader of that company is guilty of gross negligence manslaughter, you don't have to show that he/she deliberately set out to kill people.  It's enough to show that they recklessly endangered the lives of their employees or customers (in this anaology citizens) in a way that was likely to lead to loss of life.  That's all.  You don't have to prove direct intent to kill.



This could potentially include, for example, spending the time of growing national crisis focusing on your divorce proceedings and not listening to, or even attending, critical meetings.



I agree with you that it's not certain that he has a case to answer, but it certainly needs to be looked into.



I would also point out that financial concerns are not a defence against a charge of corporate negligence.  Your first duty is to protect the safety of your employees and customers, even if you know it will result in your company going bust.



If you apply that same principle to the UK, protecting the economy is not a defence you can use to justify taking actions that will result in the deaths of thousands of people.



Now you can argue that a country is not the same as a company and people should be prepared to die out of nationality loyalty in order to keep the country running, but that feels like a pretty weak argument to me unless the entire survival of the human race is at stake.



Obviously there will be several other defences that he can run against such claims like

- Experts told me that people would only tolerate lockdown for 2 weeks and after that they will go out rioting and holding orgies in the streets (this was the one they were actually running at the time - but never provided any evidence to support this claim).



- Experts told me that more people will die later if I lock down now instead of a week from now - ok then show us the data and let the experts speak to confirm or deny that this was their advice.



- My subordinates / experts didn't tell me about this.  I knew nothing about it at the time otherwise I would have acted.  In a corporate manslaughter trial this is usually the killer defence and this is why most of those trials result in acquittal.  It's worth pointing out though that this defence amounts to "I'm not negligent just incompetent and it's not illegal to be incompetent".



Anyway - this thread was really not supposed to be about personality, so let's assume I've backed down and agree with you that the PM has done nothing wrong.  Do you have any proper data or proof that the real number of additional deaths from introducing lock down later is massively lower (less than 10,000 let's say)?

[Borchester]

How many times in other threads Javert, when presented with alternative evidence and "experts" views, or anything that casts doubt on lockdown policy, have you then said "but this is a new disease, we still don't know blah blah". How many times have you defended the use of "models" in the absence of known facts and hard data on the virus because "we have to do something rather than nothing"? Now here you are waffling on about the PM resigning because one of these "models" (in retrospect let's not forget) is now BACK CALCULATING that X amount of people could have been saved if he done Y instead of Z. Talk about wisdom and hindsight. You just as well make him resign for not knowing it was going to rain. I expect some fecking "climate scientist" (at taxpayers expense) has a "model" for that though, don't they?



I stick by my conclusion that we won't know what the final toll in lives and economic damage is until this is past, and we have the data to compare excess deaths and the financial impact and suffering in the poorest half of the population.



And Captain Dynamic, I know it's fashionable for liberal lefties to sneer at Trump, I don't like him much either, but that's all political posturing. The democrats are all wonderful people of course, aren't they? :roll:  Fact is the world has to get back to work, and soon, with or without a vaccine, or there won't be an economy left to go back to. Those are the economic facts of life, and while increasing the debt mountain might make us all feel good about ourselves and what wonderful, caring people we all are, it won't make them go away.

 :hattip  :hattip

[DeppityDawg]

How many times in other threads Javert, when presented with alternative evidence and "experts" views, or anything that casts doubt on lockdown policy, have you then said "but this is a new disease, we still don't know blah blah". How many times have you defended the use of "models" in the absence of known facts and hard data on the virus because "we have to do something rather than nothing"? Now here you are waffling on about the PM resigning because one of these "models" (in retrospect let's not forget) is now BACK CALCULATING that X amount of people could have been saved if he done Y instead of Z. Talk about wisdom and hindsight. You just as well make him resign for not knowing it was going to rain. I expect some fecking "climate scientist" (at taxpayers expense) has a "model" for that though, don't they?



I stick by my conclusion that we won't know what the final toll in lives and economic damage is until this is past, and we have the data to compare excess deaths and the financial impact and suffering in the poorest half of the population.



And Captain Dynamic, I know it's fashionable for liberal lefties to sneer at Trump, I don't like him much either, but that's all political posturing. The democrats are all wonderful people of course, aren't they? :roll:  Fact is the world has to get back to work, and soon, with or without a vaccine, or there won't be an economy left to go back to. Those are the economic facts of life, and while increasing the debt mountain might make us all feel good about ourselves and what wonderful, caring people we all are, it won't make them go away.

[Javert]

But THAT is the point - he is challenging the assertion that 27,000 more HAVE died, when we DON'T know. And it is a valid challenge. Meanwhile, this is what you write...







I've been critical of the government - lots of people on here have - but here you are claiming that this will be a major part of the eventual Public Inquiry, as if its FACTUAL that 27000 more died than need have, and any honourable PM should take responsibility? Take responsibility for what FFS? A model that says 27000 more people MIGHT have died when they needn't have?



If there is an Inquiry (and there fecking well should be), and not just into the PM and the Government, but also all these fecking "experts" and their models, then it must be based on facts, not what MIGHT have happened.



As for you going on about what we "want to hear", you should look at yourself first, pal. If an "expert" told you sh*t didn't stink you'd not question it. The fact that overdone Coronavirus articles and climate science coincide with your views is not "hearing what you want to hear"? Do me a favour, Javert. You have an opinion, like anyone else on here, that's all.

So do you agree or disagree that less people would have died if the lockdown had been introduced a week earlier?



If you agree, what is your acceptable number?  If intriguing it a week earlier would have meant only a thousand less deaths, that would be ok?  If so, what about 50000?  10000?



We all know these numbers are not exact.  As far as I'm concerned it's a fact that introducing the lockdown a week or more earlier would have resulted in many thousands less deaths and hospitalisation up to this point.  



According to you it can never be known the true fact of exactly how many and therefore the question of whether the lockdown was introduced too late can't be part of the public inquiry because all modellers are climate scientist liberals and therefore it's impossible to know so we have to just let Boris off on that one?  



You've also taken my quote out of context as I was clearly saying that IF it was feasible to have known at the time that the lockdown should be introduced earlier.  If it's proved that it was impossible to know this than you have a point.



My point was that if it turns out that many thousands died unnecessarily because the lockdown was introduced later than it should have been, the PM should resign even if he was given wrong advice because he is in charge of the country and he obviously appointed incompetent advisers and ministers.  It's on him.  Obviously he won't because it's no longer fashionable for leaders to take responsibility for major failings in their organisations.

[Borg Refinery]

You only need to look at the graph of rising daily infections during March to see that an earlier lockdown would have saved a huge number of lives.

Whether or not one week earlier would have prevented three quarters of covid-19 deaths, two weeks earlier almost certainly would.



Lifting lockdown too early is very likely to see a second wave, especially if people flock to beaches.  The graph of what's happened in Iran illustrates perfectly how lockdown brought their outbreak under control and reduced the number of daily cases AND how lifting lockdown too early leads to a second wave.  It's all on the Worldometer graph for Iran, if you don't believe me.  Check the dates lockdown was introduced and lifted and see how the graph lags a few days behind those dates.



Every country got caught unawares by covid-19, but some more so than others.  It seems our government took longer than some to get to grips with what needed to be done.

Pretty much this.



I wonder how long it will take for rates to rise again? I see a bunch of expert dog excretas from 'murica are being groomed by Trump to lie about deaths from lockdown, and how it's killing folks being stuck indoors rather than laying on the beach.



https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doctors-raise-alarm-about-health-effects-of-continued-coronavirus-shutdown">https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doctor ... s-shutdown">https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doctors-raise-alarm-about-health-effects-of-continued-coronavirus-shutdown



Heh, the daily mail ironically refuted this one;

One Doctor A Day group - which sought to 'express alarm over the exponentially growing negative health consequences of the national shutdown.'



"

The group appears to have been set up with the assistance of a Republican public relations firm in Washington D.C. which distributed the ltter.



Gold is a member of the 'Save Our Country' coalition which is led by another Trump ally, Art Laffer, the conservative economist who has also spoken out against lockdown.



One Doctor A Day's talking points echo almost precisely those advanced by the White House at a cabinet meeting earlier this week, that people will die because of lockdown.

...

The letter was published by Fox News and shared online. Gold teamed up with the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons - a conservative group - to obtain the signatures.

...

The letter comes as Republican political operatives have been recruiting 'pro-Trump' doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.



The plan was discussed in a May 11 conference call with a senior staffer for the Trump reelection campaign organized by CNP Action, an affiliate of the GOP-aligned Council for National Policy. A leaked recording of the hour-long call was provided to The Associated Press by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8342497/amp/More-500-doctors-sign-letter-Trump-pushing-end-shutdown.html">https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailym ... tdown.html">https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8342497/amp/More-500-doctors-sign-letter-Trump-pushing-end-shutdown.html



Heh, those watchdog shits really are getting up Trump's nose. Digging up holes is inconvenient for em'

[Hyperduck Quack Quack]

You only need to look at the graph of rising daily infections during March to see that an earlier lockdown would have saved a huge number of lives.

Whether or not one week earlier would have prevented three quarters of covid-19 deaths, two weeks earlier almost certainly would.



Lifting lockdown too early is very likely to see a second wave, especially if people flock to beaches.  The graph of what's happened in Iran illustrates perfectly how lockdown brought their outbreak under control and reduced the number of daily cases AND how lifting lockdown too early leads to a second wave.  It's all on the Worldometer graph for Iran, if you don't believe me.  Check the dates lockdown was introduced and lifted and see how the graph lags a few days behind those dates.



Every country got caught unawares by covid-19, but some more so than others.  It seems our government took longer than some to get to grips with what needed to be done.

[DeppityDawg]

Even the person who wrote this says "the true figure could be much lower" and not that it definitely is much lower, and also he doesn't claim it is an order of magnitude lower.



And the stuff about climate science - well that's just another attempt to smear or attack someone because their conclusions are not what we wanted to hear.

But THAT is the point - he is challenging the assertion that 27,000 more HAVE died, when we DON'T know. And it is a valid challenge. Meanwhile, this is what you write...

This will be a major part of the eventual Public Inquiry - why wasn't the lockdown introduced a week earlier. In any honourable country, the PM should take 100% responsibility for that regardless of the details, however, no doubt they will all try to blame each other.

I've been critical of the government - lots of people on here have - but here you are claiming that this will be a major part of the eventual Public Inquiry, as if its FACTUAL that 27000 more died than need have, and any honourable PM should take responsibility? Take responsibility for what FFS? A model that says 27000 more people MIGHT have died when they needn't have?



If there is an Inquiry (and there fecking well should be), and not just into the PM and the Government, but also all these fecking "experts" and their models, then it must be based on facts, not what MIGHT have happened.



As for you going on about what we "want to hear", you should look at yourself first, pal. If an "expert" told you shit didn't stink you'd not question it. The fact that overdone Coronavirus articles and climate science coincide with your views is not "hearing what you want to hear"? Do me a favour, Javert. You have an opinion, like anyone else on here, that's all.

[Streetwalker]

Laugh away, there are some very nasty far right people in the Tory government.

Go on then ....who ?

[Javert]

Do you not even READ what other people post? The link is a challenge to the person whose model says there would be 75% less deaths if lockdown had been introduced a week earlier, namely James Annan - his website is there too.



Here, to save you the effort of clicking on a link, here is the challenge, and it makes some very valid points







This is a forum isn't it? People are allowed to challenge other peoples points, particularly if they start talking about things as if they are facts when they are no such thing.

Yes but his model is backed up by what actually happened - the doubling rate was backed up by the lagging numbers of people coming into hospital and later on dying, based on the known behaviour of the virus up to now.  The week before that they had a mathematician on who explained exactly that.



In other words, if you think the activities that happened prior to the March 23rd lockdown had a drastic effect already, that's not born out by the statistical analysis of the incubation, hospitalisation, and death rates (including the known skewed deviations of deaths) - that seems to show that the disease continued to double at every 4-6 days right up until March 23rd.   There were various other scientists, mathamaticians, and statisticians in other articles over recent weeks backing that up and explaining it.



In fact, if you go back through these posts you'll see that I had posited the same - that the main peak actually came too early to have been caused by the 23rd March lockdown, but, that's because I didn't know that the time between getting ill and dying does not follow a standard deviation, but a highly skewed one.



So, I agree that the article you've posted makes some good points, but I believe it's definitely in right ballpark - in other words, we are definitly talking about tens of thousands of deaths avoided by locking down a week earlier rather than just a few thousand, or zero.  And that's the point - even if it's 10,000 extra deaths and not 27,000 that's still nearly 3 times the entire number of people killed in all the years of the NI Troubles.



Of course, if you want to plug in the assumption that if the lockdown had been a week earlier, everyone would have ignored it, go ahead and do so, but it's based on zero evidence and just an random opinion.  One which I challenge given that everyone was saying any lockdown would be ignored and there would be riots etc and that never happened.



So this article asks some valid questions, but they were already covered by previous scientists on previous weeks in the same program.



Also, the model doesn't have to be that complicated to show the point that this is making - it's well established 100% factual information that viruses spread according to the R0 and will spread exponentially on a variable doubling time if the R0 is above zero - this is not something that is an opinion or in doubt whatsoever.



Even the person who wrote this says "the true figure could be much lower" and not that it definitely is much lower, and also he doesn't claim it is an order of magnitude lower.



And the stuff about climate science - well that's just another attempt to smear or attack someone because their conclusions are not what we wanted to hear.

[DeppityDawg]

No idea what you are on about - the article I listened to on the BBC mentioned several sources who were qualified to work on that stuff and were virologists, immunologists etc, all working together.



I suppose your position is that anyone who has worked on modelling climate science is not qualified to input into modelling on anything else?  Modellers work with virologists and epidemiologists to put models together, in the same way that soldiers need experts in phsyics to input into the design of the guns they use.



This is another one of those weird attacks "I don't like what this person worked on once so everything they say is wrong.

Do you not even READ what other people post? The link is a challenge to the person whose model says there would be 75% less deaths if lockdown had been introduced a week earlier, namely James Annan - his website is there too.



Here, to save you the effort of clicking on a link, here is the challenge, and it makes some very valid points

The Telegraph reports that if Britain had locked down one week earlier, 75% of British Covid-19 deaths would have been prevented. It's attracted the attention of the BBC's Jeremy Vine, and George Monbiot in The Guardian.It's based on a model by James Annan, a climate scientist, published on his blog, which was mentioned briefly by the BBC's always fantastic More or Less programme on Tuesday.



I'm not here to debunk the model, exactly, and I would never dare contradict the More or Less team. I just wanted to flag a reason to be concerned with it.



The word 'model' can describe many things, from an all-singing, all-dancing climate model which simulates the action of the entire atmosphere and ocean system down to cubic-kilometre units, to a simple statistical curve which says 'if X goes up by 1, Y will go up by 2'. The Annan model is very much at the latter end.



Its model is amazingly simple: Covid-19 infections were doubling about every 3.5 days in March; that means you get two doublings in a week. So, if lockdown had happened a week earlier, it would have prevented two doublings, so you'd have got a quarter as many infections and therefore a quarter as many deaths.



You barely even need to call it a model: it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation.



That doesn't make it wrong. Simple models are not bad; sometimes they're more appropriate. But simple models are simple. There's lots they don't take into account. Most noticeably, this one assumed that if lockdown had happened a week earlier, everything else would have happened a week earlier too. But we know that by the time lockdown happened, British lives were already very different. People were voluntarily behaving very differently even without government orders. Schools had closed a week earlier, but I know people who'd taken their kids out of school even before then. I was avoiding public transport, as were millions of others; many businesses were already working from home.



The peak of deaths came on 8 April. That's barely two weeks after lockdown — surprisingly fast, given that the mean time from infection to death is 20 days, although the median time is shorter. Lockdown may well have been what made infections actually start to decline, but a statistician I spoke to says it seems very likely that voluntary changes in behaviour had at least some effect on flattening the curve.



So it's not as simple as lockdown a week earlier –> two fewer doublings –> 75% reduction in deaths. If we'd moved the entire process forward by a week — school closures, behaviour changes, everything — that might have done it; but a lot of behaviour change was driven by seeing what was happening elsewhere. Britons saw Italy and China and became rightly scared. It's not easy to see how we'd have brought that forward.

In their report, More or Less addressed another point, which is that the model also assumes that an earlier lockdown would have been as fully complied with as the one that actually happened; a big assumption, given that a week earlier, people might not have been so scared. That caveat hasn't made it into any of the other coverage.



None of this is to say that an earlier lockdown would not have saved lives. It almost certainly would. But the stark claim that it would have prevented 75% of deaths — 30,000, so far — is wildly overconfident and I think should be reported with far more uncertainty; the true figure could be much lower.

This is a forum isn't it? People are allowed to challenge other peoples points, particularly if they start talking about things as if they are facts when they are no such thing.