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Showing posts with label lockdowns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lockdowns. Show all posts
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Saturday, November 7, 2020
Judge says care home residents in England are legally allowed visitors
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| Mr Justice Hayden said courts were concerned about the impact on elderly people of lockdowns. Photograph: Rosemary Roberts/Alamy Stock Photo |
A senior judge has said friends and family can legally visit their loved ones in care homes, in an apparent challenge to recent government policy that has in effect banned routine visits in areas of high Covid-19 infection.
Mr Justice Hayden, vice-president of the court of protection which makes decisions for people who lack mental capacity, said courts are concerned about the impact on elderly people of lockdowns. He has circulated a memo that sets out his analysis that regulations do “permit contact with relatives” and friends and visits are “lawful”.
He was responding to guidance from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) last month telling thousands of care homes in England that visiting should be stopped in areas with tier 2 and tier 3 lock down restrictions, apart from in exceptional circumstances such as the end of life.
It triggered blanket prohibitions by some councils and sparked anguish from relatives who warn a lack of contact is leading to misery and early death in some cases. Within a week, Gloucestershire county council told care homes in its area to stop visits until next spring.
With the England-wide lockdown starting on Thursday, care home providers, families and groups including Age UK and Alzheimer’s Society, have called on ministers to this time make clearer provisions for visiting. The high court judge’s comments, issued on 15 October, could boost their cause.
Hayden said exceptions in the existing regulations mean contact with residents staying in care homes is lawful for close family members and friends. He said the court of protection was concerned about “the impact the present arrangements may have on elderly people living in care homes,” citing their suffering.
Relatives and residents have become increasingly despairing at a lack of access, with some feeling their loved ones are in effect “imprisoned”. A promise by the care minister Helen Whately on 13 October to start testing relatives to allow them to visit has not been fulfilled.
Whately had told parliament that selected close relatives could be treated like key workers and allowed into care homes saying: “I am planning for us to launch a pilot on that shortly.” But no pilot has been launched. DHSC officials say they are “considering plans” with and promise further details “in due course”. Rapid turnaround saliva testing has been mooted by NHS test and trace as one way of allowing more care home visits and is being trialled in Liverpool, where the mayor, Joe Anderson, on Tuesday said it would be used in care homes.
“We can no longer stand by and watch the erosion of people’s human rights and the impact of isolation through the effective blanket bans on visiting in care homes,” said a statement co-ordinated by the National Care Forum ahead of MPs voting on Wednesday about new lockdown restrictions. NCF represents charitable care home providers and its call is backed by 60 care organisations, health charities and relatives groups.
“We know that isolation caused by restrictions on visits from loved ones is intrinsically harmful and we have heard over and again the extreme anguish that this is causing. After eight months of visitor restrictions – we cannot continue like this – there is simply not enough time for many of those living in care homes today to watch and wait.”
Blocks on care home visits were introduced in spring to reduce the spread of the virus into settings with highly vulnerable populations. More than 18,000 people have so far died from confirmed or suspected Covid-19 in UK care homes.
A spokesperson for the DHSC said: “We know limiting visits in care homes has been incredibly difficult for many families, but our first priority remains the prevention of infections to protect the lives of vulnerable residents.”
Some care residents have been in isolation since March triggering rising concern at the impact on their mental and physical health.
John’s
Campaign, which lobbies for greater involvement of family and friends
in care, has launched a legal claim over the government’s visiting
policy which details harrowing cases of separation, according to filings
seen by the Guardian.
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Monday, October 5, 2020
Stats Hold a Surprise: Lockdowns May Have Had Little Effect on COVID-19 Spread
In 1932, Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states “laboratories of democracy.” Different states can test out different policies, and they can learn from each other. That proved true in 2020. Governors in different states responded to the COVID-19 pandemic at different times and in different ways. Some states, such as California, ordered sweeping shutdowns. Others, such as Florida, took a more targeted approach. Still others, such as South Dakota, dispensed information but had no lockdowns at all.
As a result, we can now compare outcomes in different states, to test the question no one wants to ask: Did the lockdowns make a difference?
If lockdowns really altered the course of this pandemic, then coronavirus case counts should have clearly dropped whenever and wherever lockdowns took place. The effect should have been obvious, though with a time lag. It takes time for new coronavirus infections to be officially counted, so we would expect the numbers to plummet as soon as the waiting time was over.
How long? New infections should drop on day one and be noticed about ten or eleven days from the beginning of the lockdown. By day six, the number of people with first symptoms of infection should plummet (six days is the average time for symptoms to appear). By day nine or ten, far fewer people would be heading to doctors with worsening symptoms. If COVID-19 tests were performed right away, we would expect the positives to drop clearly on day ten or eleven (assuming quick turnarounds on tests).
To judge from the evidence, the answer is clear: Mandated lockdowns had little effect on the spread of the coronavirus. The charts below show the daily case curves for the United States as a whole and for thirteen U.S. states. As in almost every country, we consistently see a steep climb as the virus spreads, followed by a transition (marked by the gray circles) to a flatter curve. At some point, the curves always slope downward, though this wasn’t obvious for all states until the summer.
Watch: 0:30
Van Morrison Rails Against Coronavirus Lockdowns
Lockdowns Not the Cause
The lockdowns can’t be the cause of these transitions. In the first place, the transition happened even in places without lockdown orders (see Iowa and Arkansas). And where there were lockdowns, the transitions tended to occur well before the lockdowns could have had any serious effect. The only possible exceptions are California, which on March 19 became the first state to officially lock down, and Connecticut, which followed four days later.
Even in these places, though, the downward transitions probably started before the lockdowns could have altered the curves. The reason is that a one-day turnaround for COVID-19 test results probably wasn’t met in either state. On March 30, the Los Angeles Times reported the turnaround time to be eight days. That would make the delay from infection to confirmation not the 10 we assumed, but more like 17 days (6 for symptoms to appear, 3 for them to develop, and 8 for test processing). In early April, the Hartford Courant reported similar problems with delayed test results in Connecticut.
What’s more, there’s no decisive drop on the dates when lockdowns should have changed the course of the curves. Instead, the curves gradually bend downward for reasons that predate the lockdowns, with no clear changes ten days later.
Lockdown partisans might say that the curves would have been higher after the ten-day mark without the lockdown. While we can’t redo history to prove them wrong, the point is that the sudden and dramatic changes we should see if they were right aren’t there. If we showed people these curves without any markings, they would not be able to discern when or even if lockdowns went into effect.
The vertical lines mark the date when the number of deaths attributed to the coronavirus reached five per million people in the population. This is probably the best way to mark similar extents of viral progress in each state, since we don’t know how many total cases there were. The curves usually start to bend somewhere around the same death toll (roughly five per million people), which suggests that the approach of herd immunity caused the bends. In other words, we see in this data not only a lack of evidence that lockdowns caused the curves to bend, but also evidence of the very early stages of herd immunity.
In fact, a May 18 column in the New York Times argued that coronavirus cases in New York City probably peaked before the state lockdown began on March 22. Though that newspaper is not known for taking a critical stance on lockdowns, this point implies that the spread was slowing before the mayor and governor even ordered the lockdown.
Something caused this overall decline. It couldn’t have been lockdowns, which weren’t maintained (or heeded) in full force through June. At the moment, we can only speculate. But if this virus is like others, its decline is likely attributable to some mix of changing seasons and the gradual onset of herd immunity. Another factor, of course, could be the widespread use of masks as the year progressed.
The evidence suggests, then, that the sweeping, mandated lockdowns that followed voluntary responses exacted a great cost, with little effect on transmission. We can’t change the past, but we should avoid making the same mistake again.
Daily confirmed COVID-19 cases for the United States and thirteen U.S. states (logarithmic plots) up to May 20, 2020. Dashed line segments (drawn by hand) show the initial steep increase with gray circles marking the first visual downward change of slope. Locks mark the lockdown dates, and 10-day calendars show where lockdowns would have had visible effects. Open locks mark when lockdowns ended for Florida and Georgia, two of the first wave of states to emerge from lockdown. The vertical lines mark the dates when deaths attributed to the coronavirus reached five per million people in the population. Gaps in curves are the result of unreported data. Information sources: Doug Axe, William Briggs, and Jay W. Richards, The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe; https://ourworldindata.org/ (for U.S. cases); https://covidtracking.com/api (for state cases); https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-stay-at-home-order.html (for lockdown dates).
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