It would be interesting if anyone was able to provide evidence in support of the ‘they (U.K gov) did their best on what was known at the time and were just unlucky’ narrative that seems to be a popular view in the thread.
https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1266423527739215874?s=21This lady has good credentials to make a judgement.
Do you mean like,
"& oh wow- some of the conclusions they reached were way off. 8th SAGE meeting: 'When there is sustained transmission in the UK, contact tracing will no longer be useful."
When there is sustained transmission in the UK - why do you think contact tracing would be useful?
What, to you, is the purpose of contact tracing?
"15th SAGE meeting- March 13: 'SAGE was unanimous that measures seeking to completely suppress spread of COVID-19 will cause a second peak.' 'Community testing is ending today.' 'The science suggests household isolation...of the elderly and vulnerable should be implemented soon.'"
How is this controversial?
"16th SAGE meeting: 'The objective is to avoid critical cases exceeding NHS intensive care and other respiratory support bed capacity.'"
Again - isn't this kind of what the government was suggesting was the strategy all along? There may be a suspicion that it lead to some excess deaths because of the overwhelming focus on 'protecting the NHS' but what we had at that time was doctors in Italy basically choosing who was going to live and die because their hospitals were overwhelmed so I think that links quite clearly to making decisions based on what was known at the time.
Her tone seems to be very much "OMG" but none of what she's posting seems particularly surprising, unknown or contrary to general epidemiological knowledge.
I am pretty much in agreement on the above, if she has read through the minutes and that is all she has got then it doesn't seem that an OMG thread is needed. Some of it is already known and I have read that one from the 16th SAGE meeting a few times and struggle to see what the issue is at all. If intensive care was ovewhelmed it was clearly going to get really shitty (and it did at times), so why wouldn't you want to try really hard to keep within that limit and how can it be way off? Way off suggests you want to go above intensive care capacity??
If we look at her commeny on the 7th SAGE minutes: What is controversial about "China will be UNABLE to contain the epidemic"? They clearly didn't contain it, we know that now, so how can it have been a bad assumption? And you can read this bit as controversial "SAGE concluded that neither travel restrictions within the UK nor prevention of mass gatherings would be effective in limiting transmission.'"
But then you read the whole section and it says "6. SAGE discussed a range of potential measures to delay spread, based on a paper by SPI-M.
7. SAGE concluded that travel restrictions within the UK, unless draconian and fully adhered to, would not be effective in limiting transmission. They would also be ineffective if Covid-19 cases were already established in the UK.
8. There is no current evidence to suggest prevention of mass gatherings is effective in limiting transmission. Public actions in the absence of a mass gathering could have comparable impacts (e.g. watching a football match in a pub instead of a stadium as likely to spread the disease).
You could debate it, and down the line you may conclude it was a mistake, but even now I can read that and don't think wow that's mad. They look like they have considered it, and explained why they didn't take those actions. FWIW I am pretty sure that was all published ages ago, as it looks very familiar.
Some of it does look a bit shaky, but that thread seems "way off".