"UK must prepare for riots" - SAGE Member

Locked down sooner

How much sooner? Part of the reason they picked the time they did was because they wanted to have the peak of people obeying the lockdown overlapping with the projected peak of the coronavirus overwhelming the NHS. Lockdown too soon and people will be more likely to disobey initially since they don't perceive a threat, and/or get tired of being in lockdown so more likely to break lockdown.

Listened to scientific advice at the time instead of relying on an outdated playbook (herd immunity)

They did listen to scientific advice. They consulted the CMO and other leading medical and scientific and statistical bodies in the UK. They opted to follow their advice given all the information available at the time rather than a populist decision of immediately following what every other country was doing. Each country is faced with different factors of different weights and times to deal with it. Also, the herd immunity thing started as just a quip about how it'd be a silver lining to how no strategy until we develop a safe, effective and deploy-able vaccine is able to completely halt and prevent further spread of covid-19.

Implemented testing instead of just talking about it

There was no shortage of effort to scale it up as quickly as possible. It was a matter of making sure all independent labs willing to sign on for helping process the kits were equipped, met the same standards, and were supplied. The chief factor being a massive shortage of the reagents used in testing because of a worldwide demand and runaway bidding wars for said reagents.

Given honest figures instead of constantly lying

Even now, worldwide there is no gold standard of showing the figures. I think the best so far has been showing the amount of deaths above average for this year compared to other years. So reporting deaths has been a mess and impossible to compare across countries.

Prioritised human lives instead of the economy

You mean like the Treasury writing a blank cheque for the NHS, and creating a furlough scheme the debt of which the Treasury is in from has never been seen before?

/r/policeuk Thread Parent Link - independent.co.uk