Softly softly or hard lockdown - what's the best approach?

Spoiler - we don't know because no other government has got to this stage and not imposed a lockdown.

I haven't posted for a while, mainly because the data that I first started to analyse became less and less reliable - it is clear now that data based on cases is only as good as the testing regime of the country. As that differs vastly, it is difficult to compare the approach by different countries and their effectiveness on the number of cases in that country.

But there is one set of data that should  be comparable - the death rate. Conspiracy theories aside, the number of deaths relating to the virus should be accurate and comparable between countries. Therefore it should be possible to look at the effectiveness of the actions of that country on the death rate.  I've been reluctant to look at this, I think largely because we are talking about real people dying. People we might know or people we care about, the potential impact of this virus on those we love is starting to become far too close home.

Firstly I should point out that outside of China and South Korea, it is probably too early to correlate any actions with the change in death rate - although in Europe, Italy is probably starting to show some significant statistics now.

How is the UK looking compared to other countries?

I think this graph is now well publicised, but if you use the day that each country saw 10 deaths due to COVID-19 as day 1, we can see that the UK is tracking ahead of Italy at this point in time:

As we can see, only Spain (just) has a higher death rate at this point in time than the UK.  We can see the curve of Italy and even now after extreme measures we are seeing a daily death rate of over 800 people.

So if Italy are still seeing a high death rate and Spain are seeing more deaths than the UK at this stage, having imposed a lockdown, are more extreme measures actually effective?

Well as I said earlier, we have to consider that we are fairly on in terms of the actions and therefore it is hard to determine the effectiveness of the actions - there is naturally a lag as none of these things have an instant impact.  

One way we can look at this is to look at a rolling average, based on the last 5 days % increase of deaths:

Here we can see that Italy's lockdown has had a significant impact on the rolling average, it is heading in the right direction despite a lot of people still dying every day from the virus.

The Spanish actions also indicate a move in the right direction, despite it being too early for any signifiant correlation to be determined.

France is the odd one out here, despite having imposed a lockdown just under week ago, their rolling average has hardly declined - what is yet to be seen is whether this is due to a lack of enforcement or whether this action simply doesn't have the same impact in every country.

What makes the current strategy from the UK difficult to compare against any other country is that no other country at this stage has held back from imposing a harsher set of actions in terms of lockdown.  Various social media posts suggests that some of the UK population are still not taking this seriously, perhaps they should look at what happened in France when this happened:

Thurs: School shut down

Sat: Bars, cafes and restaurants forced to close

Mon: Full lockdown imposed

Currently we are only heading one way, I'm sure when Boris suggested they would seriously be considering the next steps over the next 24 hours, he would have been looking at our European neighbours and how they are "getting this done".