re: #124 lawhawk

The UK government considered going for herd immunity very early on in this pandemic but instead went into quite a hard lockdown in the middle of March on the advice of the science community who laid out the modelling numbers which suggested a million dead if things were left to run their course. The result, we’re through our peak (about 45,000 dead confirmed with COVID-19, about 60,000 excess deaths over the average death rate) without ever overloading our hospitals although it was close and we seriously stressed our healthcare staff in the doing.

The numbers of new cases in the UK is now in the low hundreds per day, the point at which contact tracing might work. We’re opening up slowly and ready to lock down again if needed but mostly on a local basis — the city of Leicester was locked down a couple of days ago after a sudden rise in cases, a local outbreak on the Scottish borders was hammered down and seems to be under control with all contacts in that outbreak traced.

Scotland’s numbers for the day are out, 18 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed which is a worrying rise but they’re not clustered, apparently. No new deaths but more people are in hospital as, I think, their cases got worse with more of them in intensive care. The national daily report will come out later with England’s new cases and deaths being the major part of of those numbers.