And if there is a second surge in the autumn, we're massively better equipped now to bash it down South Korea-style. In fact, there's really no excuse not to be able to do that.
We are massively better equipped now because that sort of statement is relative to how terribly poorly we were equipped before. So there has been a big improvement, but that doesnt mean our capabilities are now equivalent to those of highly touted countries like South Korea, or Germany.
Reasons it could still all go wrong later:
If we dont continue to build on the work done so far so that we eventually end up with a decent system.
If too many people fail to engage with the system, if compliance is poor.
If the numbers grow too large for such systems to handle.
The last point has applied to even the successful countries, their excellent test & trace systems still have limits, and it is possible to find articles online that say Germany had to suspend its system for a while during their first wave. And in South Korea, we know that system cannot carry all of the weight on its own, they have still had to impose additional restrictions on people to cope with certain periods.
Concerns about winter as expressed by many including Whitty are based on large amounts of conventional wisdom. Its not impossible to consider that things might not pan out as expected during that season, but it would be unwise to bet against what we think we know about respiratory viruses and winter. With this conventional wisdom tends to come assumptions that the number of cases will become very large over that period, too large for a manual test & trace system to cope with. So the app becomes far more important, and even then there are likely to assumptions that further mitigation measures will be required again, at least for the very peak period.
If I study that conventional wisdom, one of its most obvious blind spots is that its based on our experiences over many years that involve seasonal diseases that we consider inevitable, that we mostly try to deal with via vaccination campaigns and public health messages. Upticks are noted and the system braces for a wave, but there arent usually any non-vaccine attempts to suppress the wave with those other diseases. It will be interesting to see what happens this time, because the way we approach any initial uptick might be quite different to the convention, and so the results might be quite different too. I dont know quite how much we will get to see of this though because I dont know how much our stance will still end up similar to last time. Will we try to press down hard, early, nip it in the bud, or will we revert to stuff that is based on the idea that the winter wave is inevitable, blunting ambitions to do anything other than belatedly trying to blunt the very peak? I think it would be unwise for me to try to judge that this early, it depends what the mood is when we reach that point. It would, for example, be easy to make negative assumptions about peoples levels of compliance with future lockdowns etc, but my thoughts on that would be too heavily influenced by the mood right now, and the mood could be very diferent again by then. Same goes for guessing how far the government would be willing to go, judging how we think they might act in winter when they are currently in cheerleading 'open stuff and remove the temporary safety nets' mode seems ripe for error.
