I have no respect for Prof Ferguson; he is a failure and he is disgraced (more so than Cummings I would argue; he really ought to have have been given at least the same amount of flak)
Also, while they thought they could get away with it, and to some extent they did, there are some flaws:
Firstly, although authoritarians in this country are very vocal in their support for lockdowns, they are a minority.
Most people would accept a lockdown if they knew it would be short and effective; people were mislead to believe this and therefore there was mass support at the start. But not now that the truth is known.
We did not lockdown in the way China did and we could never have done so; people who had symptoms that indicated they might have had the virus were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in huge halls. People could not leave their house for any reason. Food had to be delivered. No exercise, and so on.
The original D614 strain which caused the epidemic in Wuhan was less transmissible than the G614 strain which became dominant in Europe. Many reports claimed the D614 strain, which is the strain that drove the high rate of infections in Italy, was up to 10 times more transmissible than the original strain.
This report includes a graph showing how the G614 strain came to dominate:
A SARS-CoV-2 variant carrying the Spike protein amino acid change D614G has become the most prevalent form in the global pandemic. Dynamic tracking of…
www.sciencedirect.com
View attachment 87897
So, at the time European countries were imposing lockdowns, they were never going to work because:
- the lockdowns could never be anywhere near as strict as the Wuhan lockdown; and
- the new strain was far more transmissible and could not so easily be eliminated by lockdowns.
Someone at my workplace still goes round telling people that if we locked down long enough and hard enough we would have eliminated it; apart from a hard lockdown being impossible in the UK, this ignores the fact that European countries had a very different strain to deal with compared to the original strain from Wuhan. But pro-lockdown authoritarians do not want to do this level of research as it does not suit their authoritarian agenda.
I wish Prof Ferguson and all pro-lockdown authoritarians would emigrate to China, or South Koera, where they can indulge in authoritarianism and leave the rest of us in peace.