The UK's number of COVID-19 patients in hospital peaked at 19,500 in mid-April and fell to 800 by the start of September.
That's despite things like the 'eat out to help out' scheme that ran until the end of August.
Schools and colleges re-opened in September [1] and the government started "encouraging" workers back to offices [2] - and admittedly, by the end of September patients in hospital had only risen to 2,400.
But by mid-November we see the second wave peaking at 16,500 hospitalised. Today, as we come out of the second lockdown, there are still 15,000 patients in hospital.
The UK has not demonstrated that schools can safely be kept open.
Unfortunately, as the geniuses in government decided to reopen schools and universities and offices all at the same time, it's difficult to directly attribute the second wave to any single policy decision.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/schools-and-colleges-to-r... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53942542
From our data, it doesn't appear that schools were a massive driver of transmission.
We know that kids don't spread it as much as they do the flu, so on balance, keeping schools open seems like the better course of action as long as it's not a major driver of infection rates.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/08/covid-cases-an...
We shouldn't expect hospitalised cases to fall immediately - although they have been falling for the past week or so. Lockdowns - even excluding schools - clearly are effective at reducing transmission rates below 1. Unfortunately the lesser measures we're currently under don't seem to be - as cases have plateaued and are starting to rise again.
For a good reason.
By almost all the statistics, the second wave hasn't been as bad as the first. Comparing peaks, measures like "Deaths within 28 days of positive test" (942 vs 486) and "Weekly deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate" (9,495 vs 3,371) and "Patients in hospital" (19,518 vs 16,421) and "Patients in mechanical ventilation beds" (3,252 vs 1,461) say the second peak was about half the height of the first one.
On the other hand, "Cases by date reported" peaked at 5,113 in the first lockdown and 25,329 in the second lockdown - making the second wave 5x higher than the first. Presumably due to a lack of test capacity.
If I'd chosen the one metric which makes the second wave look 5x the first instead of 0.5x, that'd be a pretty deceptive way of describing the results of government policy (although technically accurate).
There is a major complaint here against the lockdowns. They have positive and negative outcomes and there is very little evidence that the two sides have been weighed against each other. The scale of the damage done by our response is too great to accept best effort attempts to control the disease. The standard of the response needs to be excellence, not competence.
We also can't discount the possibility that there were easier, less invasive measures than lockdowns that captured a lot of the benefit without the costs. It has been a chaotic year but there is no natural law that says every time there is a pandemic the only option is to scuttle the economic ship.
Arguably this reduced the pain, while also reducing the effectiveness of the lockdown measures. It's a fine balancing act. It's hard to compute precisely, we're not yet good at it as a society. That said, expecting people to work while having children at home and at the same expecting grandparents to stay isolated, puts people on a very tough spot. How do people cope with that in places that kindergartens are still closed?
Outcomes are also not binary (life or death). There is also the possibility of a gamut of lifelong health problems from, e.g. scarred lungs, for both kids and parents.
[1] 12.7% deaths and 29.1% cases https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard-demogra...
