“There is no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher mortality rate or that it affects vaccines, although urgent work is underway to confirm this,” UK Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said, in a Saturday statement.
Just days after The British Medical Journal and the Health Service Journal implored Boris Johnson to forbid mixing by households during the Christmas holiday in order to safeguard the National Health Service, the UK is headed into an even stricter lockdown, prompted by an aggressive new variant of COVID-19.
“There’s no evidence to suggest it is more lethal or causes more severe illness,” Johnson said Saturday, echoing Whitty in the course of effectively abandoning what some critics suggested was an ill-conceived plan to allow as many as three households to congregate in “Christmas bubbles.”
The “Christmas bubble” idea unceremoniously burst Saturday, as Johnson was effectively forced into submission by the new COVID strain.
“It is with a very heavy heart I must tell you we cannot continue with Christmas as planned,” Johnson said, during a press conference. “I sincerely believe there is no alternative open to me.”
A new “Tier 4” will be imposed in London and southeast England. It’s effectively a stay-at-home order. London is now back in a full-on lockdown thanks to the mutated virus strain. Household mixing during the holiday is banned in the designated areas. Under the new tier, non-essential shops are closed.
“Without action the evidence suggests infections would soar, hospitals would become overwhelmed and many thousands more would lose their lives,” Boris said.
Obviously, this will be a blow to the UK services sector and especially to retail establishments. It comes after an exhausting week of Brexit negotiations, which were characteristically fraught and produced hundreds (if not thousands) of sometimes contradictory headlines.
The Bank of England, at its last meeting of 2020, kept policy unchanged Thursday. The central bank indicated it still expects a free trade agreement on January 1, but admitted that “the increase in COVID cases and associated re-imposition of restrictions” may mean GDP growth in the fourth quarter will be “a little weaker than expected at the time of the November report.” You’ll recall that last month, the bank cut its assessment to reflect a Q4 downturn.
Suffice to say it’s possible the BOE’s “a little weaker” language from the December statement could turn out to be optimistic, something the bank seemed to recognize. “The restrictions on activity introduced after those lockdowns have been tighter than the Committee had assumed in its November forecast, and are expected to weigh more on activity in the first quarter of 2021,” the statement read.
Again, that was on Thursday. Fast forward 48 hours, and a third of England’s population (give or take) is headed into a total lockdown. The new strain of the virus is up to 70% more transmissible, experts assess.
As Bloomberg reminds you, “the UK has already suffered its deepest recession since the Great Frost of 1709.” In other words, the last time the UK experienced an economic downturn as bad as that suffered in 2020, the US was still a collection of British colonies. The figure (below) shows you what April’s contraction looked like prior to revisions.
The British Retail Consortium called the new restrictions “hugely regrettable.” “Retailers have invested hundreds of millions of pounds making stores COVID–safe for customers and staff,” Helen Dickinson, the group’s CEO remarked. “For businesses, the government’s stop-start approach is deeply unhelpful.”
The UK was the first western nation to approve and administer a vaccine. While that presumably means a quicker path to normalization, in the near-term the outlook is as bleak as it’s ever been for the country during the pandemic.
“As a result of the rapid spread of the new variant, preliminary modeling data and rapidly rising incidence rates in the South East, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group now consider that the new strain can spread more quickly,” Whitty added, in the statement quoted here at the outset.
Disconcertingly, Britain’s Chief Scientific Officer, Patrick Vallance, said “we think [the new strain] may be in other countries as well.”
Don’t worry, folks. The genius strrategists and “economists” on Wall Street and in London will continue to reassure us humble investors that the vaccines assure a robust economic resurgence in the first quarter, the second at worst.
This obviously begs the question of when this strain will be first discovered in the US. The important question is what will the reaction function be, what will policy makers say and do when the first case is confirmed. What will the public reaction be.
All the while, it’s dumbfounding that legislators would gamble with tools that could be used to respond. Not to mention, of course, aid to under-nourished children (here in America) and all the new counts of people who are going to be homeless by the end of February (here in America).
Let’s estimate the probability of a financial economy crash in the next six months at 2% given the current set of Fed tools. A Fed unable to respond quicker to a challenge sans the Toomey tools, and the scenario devolves, what happens to the probability? Let’s say it goes up to 3%. It’s a dangerous game.
A Brexit crash out looks more and more probable. Now imagine that while Western European countries are restricting travel from the UK. Perfect storm anyone. Brexit and the Pandemic are just two examples of how politicians are the wrong people to be leading during global crises that need expertise rather than political grandstanding. The Brexit vote was a political stunt that backfired dramatically. As is clear now, people were asked to vote on an issue that wasn’t clear to anyone. And, you only have to look at the UK and the US to see stunning ineptitude in managing a medical crisis. Should I even bring up cyber security. A deliberative body only accountable to their handlers is not a viable way to run any supposedly democratic country. Nor are activist partisan judges who conjured up a Citizens United ruling a good way to insure a government of, by and for the people.
John3D, what is the way out?
Increase public spending on education.
Drastically reduce the costs for a college education, which is prohibitively high in both the US and UK.
Start with primary education – value teachers as a profession, and that includes adequate payment – no teacher should depend on a second job or food stamps to make ends meet.
Make education great again (sorry, couldn’t resist).
Seriously, though, if more people understood that getting a good education is a value in and of itself and not just a mean to an end, the world would be a better place.
Educated people tend to make better decisions.
It is a generational project, for sure, but you gotta start somewhere. Making being a teacher more attractive (including, but not limited to, financially) is a start.
Ok, H, This variant thing is probably BS. That 70% more infectious is based on a model and as you know all models are bad but some of them are useful. There simply is no way to know whether the effects of this small change means anything and, in point of fact, Occam’s razor suggests that, it might be a slightly different variant but the patterns of its spread are consistent with the quick spread of the virus in other places. This is to say with increased human movement and contact.
Even if this was more contagious, the chances of a virus escaping immunity is vanishingly small at this point so the vaccines won’t be affected. Much to do about nothing.
God, I really detest most science reporting. It tends to be reckless, sensational or ignorant.