My recent post suggesting that the government may have some reasonable thinking behind their go-slow-but-not-too-slow strategy had two underlying errors:
- I assumed they knew what the NHS capacity is, and were trying not to linger too long in the period where there is plenty of spare capacity. In fact, resources already appear to be overstretched, particularly protective equipment (PPE), even though the epidemic has barely started, and there are just a few thousand cases in total so far.
- I neglected to reckon with — what was otherwise obvious to me — Johnson’s Churchill complex. Johnson doesn’t have all that much in common with Churchill, but one thing the two do share is a mania for all manner of harebrained wheezes rather than careful dependable planning. Keynes famously said “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better to fail with the crowd than to succeed unconventionally”. Johnson is one of those rare individuals who would rather fail unconventionally — or, at least, is willing to hazard a strong risk of failure for the compensation of being seen as brilliantly unconventional.
Now the government says they miscalculated, after a paper from Imperial College’s Covid-19 Response Team found that the previous strategy would exceed available ICU capacity by a factor of 8! Did they misplace a decimal point? So suddenly the schools, gyms, and everything else that was announcing plans to cope with staying open through the epidemic is shutting down.
I find it genuinely shocking that the UK does not have a strategic reserve of PPE and ventilators, particularly the latter, as the shortage of ventilators was widely discussed in the press in 2009, in the context of the H1N1 pandemic.
Anyway, I’m glad I’m not in the US…
Common Infirmities 