Say What!? UK Downgrades Coronavirus Threat, While Increasing Social Control Measures

Yet Another Covid-19 "Say What?" Moment

by Rob Slane - The Blogmire

March 25, 2020


On 23rd March, the British Government put the entire country on lockdown risking incalculable consequences that could bring:

Economic meltdown
The mother of all financial crashes
Millions of job losses
Thousands of businesses going to the wall
Masses of people plunged into poverty
A huge deterioration in the mental health of millions
The potential deaths of thousands of old people left on their own with no carers (see the example of the Spanish care homes)
Mass civil unrest

Such enormous risks can surely only be justified if they are proportionate to threat. Are they?

The most astonishing thing I have seen or heard over the last few days — and there’s a lot to choose from — is something that appears on the Government’s own website. There, it shows that on 19th March, four days before the lockdown announcement, a decision was taken to downgrade Covid-19 from a “High Consequence Infectious Disease”, which it had been listed as since January, basically because more information was now known about it and because:

“in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall)”!

You read that right. A downgrade, not an upgrade. Don’t believe me? Well here it is, lifted from their own website (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid (archived copy: http://archive.is/OIh3f)):

Frankly, I’m at a loss to understand this. The country put on lockdown risking incalculably High Consequences, four days after the virus in question was deemed not to be a High Consequence Infectious Disease and thus downgraded. Am I missing something?