Some thoughts on Covid from a UK perspective. I’m constantly amazed at how the media is reporting this. Perhaps the worst example in my opinion is reporting the fatality rate as a measure of how a government has and is handling the pandemic. Absent a vaccine you can’t stop people catching the virus and a proportion of those will unfortunately die. So pretty much every government in the world has – with varying degrees of rigour and outcome – gone for lockdowns and travel restrictions. Neither of which stop people catching the virus or dying from it. What they do is slow the rate of transmission (The ‘R’ number) to a greater or lesser extent depending on an absolute multitude of factors including but not limited to how harsh it is but also population density and, I suspect, a whole host of other things that will only be teased out in future. But, “The simple truth is that lockdowns do not work” says the Telegraph (19 December 2020), I quote: “Truth is, our past efforts have been useless. They reduced infections and associated deaths while the lockdowns were in force, but only by shifting them into a later period. That is why we are where we are now.” But that’s exactly what they are designed to do? I also wonder what metric these people are using to evaluate whether a measure is ‘working’ or not bearing in mind there’s a huge amount we don’t know about how and why it spreads. Equally egregious is the ‘We should have locked down harder, earlier!’ school. Firstly that’s applying 20:20 hindsight. Secondly that perpetuates the asinine fallacy that’s there’s a zero sum trade off between lockdown and fatalities because lockdown also kills. The cancer (and other) patients not getting diagnosed or having essential surgery postponed or cancelled. The mental illness caused by the slowing or cessation of economic activity and the consequent destruction of peoples lives. People dying of poverty because they can’t afford the basics. It all adds up so the idea that any of these decisions are made casually is simply wrong. Having been involved in Incident Management for over 10 years and seen how some pretty significant events (7/7, SE Asian Tsunami etc.etc.) have been managed a few things are clear to me; In the thick of it there are no easy or clear solutions – it’s a case of trying to go with the least worst option based on the specialist advice and the information available to you at the time. You are well aware that the said information will be incomplete and possibly incorrect but you have to go with what you have. The decision maker is almost always not the subject matter expert – their role is big picture decision making – so they have to trust the expert(s). They are not going to like a lot of the information they get but changing the expert(s) until you find them agreeing with you is a recipe for disaster. A final thought; Isn’t it truly astounding how many people in the media have hitherto undisclosed epidemiological expertise? One wonders how they found the time for the years of study and practice needed to confidently declare the advice given by SAGE etc. to be wrong while forging their media careers?