Quote Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker View Post
There is pressure to re-open the economy. Everybody talks about clamping down again if there is a spike, but that's going to be VERY hard for politicians to do. That means that a rise will be wished away, and a clamp down will only happen when a spike has become so pronounced that a catastrophe is already well underway.

We need FAR more testing over here. We need far more contact tracing, but since we're starting from near zero, the percentage increase will be astronomical. We don't have either of those, and cases aren't dropping in many areas, but we're still going ahead with opening. It may work out.
Our testing approach has been an utter failure, we aren't managing anywhere near enough tests (even with dubious maths to reach our self imposed targets). Contact tracing isn't going to be much use when nobody knows if any of the contacts have COVID-19 or not because not enough testing is being done to establish a baseline in the first place. Nobody seems to know what is happening with the tracing App, although the proposed solution is highly likely to be a failure due to mobile security preventing background tracking.

If we do start to relax the rules and another wave hits then the economic impact of a second shutdown will be far worse than just making sure this first lockdown is long enough, however being half-arsed is pretty much the standard approach by this government so....