The reality is the figures aren't looking promising .
We are paying the price now for the early complacency when the government was sat on its hands and people were being told that it's just like flu with a 1% fatality rate.
Now we have the highest toll in Europe and >14.5% fatality rate based on 31k deaths from 211k cases so far.
Tim
Surely the issue is we simply don't know how many cases? (What we do know, is how many people tested positive of the tiny proportion of the overall UK population who have been tested). And without knowing the real answer of how many cases - but with a huge sample bias because those tested are in the main the severely ill presenting at hospital, we don't know the true fatality rate.
I don't disagree that, without this data, we should work on the worst-case scenario (which is probably the observed fatality rate) and make public policy accordingly.
The early 'complacency' (but not the PPE débâcle) may be ascribed to a naieve trust in the value of herd immunity - which I still believe was abandoned because the strategy was too hard a political sell and the Imperial study was just a convenient marker buoy about which to change tack. Of course, the real reason for changing direction should have been because the science doesn't yet tell us whether Covid-19 confers lasting immunity or not - and here too we should base policy on the worst-case assumption, which we are.
