An (almost) unique view

Newton Emerson in the IT has a curious take on the disagreements in Northern Ireland over school closures and other measures to tackle the crisis. He writes that:

Every Minister in the five-party Executive held a joint press conference to explain their shared coronavirus policy, based on scientific advice they had received from the North’s chief medical officer.
There had been differences of opinion among the parties on accepting school closure advice. However, all put on a reassuring display of collective responsibility for the public.
Less than 24 hours later, without consulting Executive partners, Sinn Féin demanded immediate school closures. Pressure had built on the party after the UK government’s policy was wrongly characterised as “herd immunity”, following a thoughtless remark at a Downing Street press conference.
Although other countries in Europe were practising the same policy at various stages, Irish exceptionalism saw only a difference between the UK and Ireland, while Anglophobia interpreted this as a callous experiment.

Moreover Emerson argues that:

Northern Ireland is closing its schools this evening, at an earlier point in the epidemic than the Republic.

How on earth can we tell given that testing in the North is so limited.

But to argue that ‘herd immunity’ was a mischaracterisation is to mischaracterise the overall context. As Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, the Guardian noted yesterday, this wasn’t a throwaway remark:

The scientists advising ministers seemed to believe that this new virus could be treated much like influenza. Graham Medley, one of the government’s expert scientific advisers, was disarmingly explicit. In an interview on Newsnight last week, he explained the UK’s approach: to allow a controlled epidemic of large numbers of people, which would generate “herd immunity”. Our scientists recommended “a situation where the majority of the population are immune to the infection. And the only way of developing that, in the absence of a vaccine, is for the majority of the population to become infected.”

And:

Medley suggested that, “ideally”, we might need “a nice big epidemic” among the less vulnerable. “What we are going to have to try and do,” he said, was to “manage this acquisition of herd immunity and minimise the exposure of people who are vulnerable.”

But it wasn’t just Medley.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, suggested that the target was to infect 60% of the UK’s population.

And it concludes:

After weeks of inaction, the government announced a sudden U-turn on Monday, declaring that new modelling by scientists at Imperial College had convinced them to change their initial plans. Many journalists, led by the BBC, reported that “the science had changed” and so the government had responded accordingly. But this interpretation of events is wrong. The science has been the same since January. What changed is that government advisers at last understood what had really taken place in China.

Let’s consider some non-UK or ROI based analyses of the events of the last week. Foreign Policy notes that:

While continental Europeans were closing schools and putting soldiers on the streets to enforce strict quarantine rules, the British government’s official advice to its citizens was, essentially, just to keep calm and carry on. Schools, restaurants, theaters, clubs, and sporting venues remained open; only the over-70s and those with flu-like symptoms were advised to stay at home. The low-key British response was driven by a controversial theory embraced by the U.K. government’s top scientists: that the best way to ease the long-term consequences of the coronavirus pandemic was to allow the virus to spread naturally in order to build up the population’s herd immunity.

And:

On Monday night, that theory collided with the facts. A new analysis by immunologists at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine of the impact of the coronavirus in Italy suggested that up to 30 percent of patients hospitalized with the virus would require intensive care treatment. Those numbers, if repeated in the U.K., would quickly overwhelm Britain’s state-run National Health Service.

Within hours of the report, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared at a daily briefing at No. 10 Downing St. to reverse the herd immunity policy. Acknowledging that “drastic action” was required, Johnson announced that from now on Britons should try to work from home and voluntarily refrain from unnecessary travel and social contact.

And as this piece in the Atlantic notes, herd immunity was most certainly articulated as a part of the British government plan only to be reversed within 48 hours in the face of a rising chorus of hostility from the scientific community which pointed out the basic flaws in said plan.

As the Atlantic notes:

To avoid a second peak in the winter, Vallance said the U.K. would suppress the virus “but not get rid of it completely,” while focusing on protecting vulnerable groups, such as the elderly. In the meantime, other people would get sick. But since the virus causes milder illness in younger age groups, most would recover and subsequently be immune to the virus. This “herd immunity” would reduce transmission in the event of a winter resurgence. On Sky News, Vallance said that “probably about 60 percent” of people would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity.

And a key point:

…critics of the U.K. strategy argue that swift, decisive action matters more than future hypotheticals do. The country’s current caseload puts it only a few weeks behind Italy, where more than 24,000 cases have so overburdened hospitals that doctors must now make awful decisions about whom to treat. South Korea, by contrast, seems to have brought COVID-19 to heel through a combination of social-distancing measures and extensive testing. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have been similarly successful. “That’s what you need to be doing. You go all in, or not at all. And not at all ends up like Italy,” Hanage says. “Making plans for what you are going to be doing in six months when you have a catastrophe awaiting you in three weeks is just stupid.”

In other words to try to see this as simply a nationalist/unionist dispute or to attempt to wave away the intrinsic contradictions on the part of the British government and unionism in relation to this is a stretch. More than a stretch.