Relaxing the covid lockdown — a goal without a plan is just a wish | thearticle

Targets within the Home Office for the number of illegal immigrants to be deported each year ended up in the Windrush scandal. Targets for reducing emissions by any means when cars were

tested led to the “VW dieselgate” scandal. “Targetology”, as it is known, is reassuring and dangerous. It can distract our focus away from what really matters. Boris Johnson promised 200,000

coronavirus tests a day by the end of May and a “world-beating” track and trace system for the schools to go back on June 1. The Prime Minister is a targetologist, a “what and when” sort of

guy. We can’t get an answer to how a test is defined — is it people tested (as he originally tweeted) or all tests swabs used (as used in the daily briefings) or now as the 200,000 tests

target is suddenly hit, is it redefined as “capacity”? We also can’t pin down the turnaround times from testing to results. The Government aims to return tests in between 48-72 hours, but

the stories of NHS workers still without results weeks later are not isolated incidents. South Korea can complete a test in 10 mins at a mobile centre and the results are sent to your phone

within 24 hours. It isn’t acceptable that the chart with the five tests that must be passed before lockdown is eased didn’t contain any numbers. Research has now shown up the hard numbers on

the dangers to public compliance caused by the Cummings scandal — our Prime Minister’s answer to address this issue has been more distraction via “targetology”. June 1 suddenly became Super

Relaxation Monday: schools open, car dealers can open, street markets can open, the number of people who can meet increases to six and the 2m people who were told they needed shielding can

now go out. A growing number of scientists seem to have had enough of our Government targets and dates justified by “following the science” without the science advice being revealed. Dame

Angela McLean, the Government’s Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser stated that scientists had been “very clear” that changes to social distancing measures needed to be based on “observed levels

of incidence in places that there’s going to be change, not on a fixed date.” When the planned reopening of schools on June 1st was announced McLean added: “Scientists have been clear in

our advice that changes to lockdown as we modelled them need a highly effective track, trace and isolate system to be in place”. We’ve wasted the window we had in lockdown for planning and

consultation to make relaxation of the rules as safe as possible. The Danish government, before it announced any dates for going back to school, worked with schools and unions and shared its

scientific rationale. The R rate was 0.6 when schools reopened (we are at between 0.7 and 0.9). Denmark had mutually agreed a plan that allowed a target date. When the June 1st target date

for schools re-opening was announced in England, it seems to have been with minimal pre-consultation with the schools, teachers and local authorities. It’s unnecessarily reckless that our

Prime Minister frequently announces targets and dates before he has an agreed a plan, before safety advice is agreed with business or transport companies and, one now suspects, before he has

consulted his scientists. Three people died last week on the coast because there was no time or budget to get safety in place as lockdown was loosened. The RNLI (the charity that guards our

coasts) says it “had less warning than shops” over lockdown easing. The June 1st target for schools wasn’t moved. The government instead doubled down on reassurance with a new batch of

“targetology”. Britain now has 25,000 trackers — another target “hit” — and we were told that everyone in the UK with symptoms could now be tested. But big numbers are not the same as a

working plan (e.g. 170 million items of PPE distributed, which became 460 million, then 760 million then over a billion). Most of our thousands of contact tracers are newly trained employees

working from home in a virtual call centre, being paid close to the living wage. They are not ringing up to tell you your Ocado delivery is running late. They tell total strangers they have

the virus, might have met someone with the virus and instruct them to self-isolate for 14 days. Recruited trackers have already complained of chaotic training and an inability to get on the

system. Our “world-beating” solution to prevent a second spike was supposedly built on a three-legged stool. The third leg, the app, is now missing. What was described as an essential

aspect of an effective integrated policy is now redefined as an additional “nice to have”, sometime to be added later. To hit the target date we are now told it’s safe to sit on a two-legged

stool. Hitting 200,000 daily tests, having 25,000 tracers or a working app matters little if we can’t contact and contain local outbreaks. Yet, it was only last Tuesday that a letter from

Public Health England went to councils’ directors of public health asking for information on the “current resources” devoted to managing the more serious outbreaks. This could have been done

months ago. The UK could claim to have a higher capacity for daily testing than South Korea. Yet, if someone refuses to self-isolate when traced, there doesn’t appear to be any escalation

process for the contact tracer, or for them. The lag between taking a test and getting results is days, and possibly weeks, all of which increases the chances of the virus spreading. It we

allow ourselves to be distracted by the “targetology”, we are missing the real point. More people in the UK died of Covid-19 on 27th May than died in the entire South Korean outbreak. We are

starting to relax lockdown when we have 8,000 daily new cases. At the end of last week South Korea was able to identify a localised spike of just 177 new Covid-19 cases and could move to

rapidly close down hundreds of schools and other high contact areas. The question we need our Government to answer isn’t how many tests or contact tracers we have. It is: if this happened

somewhere in the UK next week, could you do the same? The Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, describes the easing of lockdown as “a very dangerous moment”. We all want

lockdown to be relaxed and hope that a second spike doesn’t happen. But the hoped-for target of keeping deaths below 20,000 defines the real danger the Government still needs to address —

as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put it, “a goal without a plan is just a wish.”