I suspect that was a fallacy; the big increase in cases (rather than the linear increase which was partly caused by increased testing) happened when kids went back to school, and then shot up off the scale when students went back. It's clear education (and associated socialising) was the main issue, and yet we sit there, fingers in ears, singing "la la la", unwilling to address that for fear of upsetting someone's kids (kids who tend to be much more resilient than the adults who are actually getting upset).
My view is that if schools had been redesigned for 2m (or even 1m) distancing, perhaps by operating 6 days a week with 3 in 3 out to halve numbers in at any given time, and that if universities went "stay at home and do online only, and we'll arrange specific lab access opportunities, perhaps by cooperation between universities to do it in your most local one that can", that we'd not have been in a vastly worse position now than in August.
My view is that had government used the time that the lockdown bought at vast expense to actually build a "world class" test, trace and isolate system that we would be in a considerably better position than now. Long term harmful changes to educational settings are not sustainable and shouldn't be considered. About the one decent (non-)decision the government has made is for schools and universities to operate largely as normal. It's absolutely essential that people are properly educated.
"Blended learning" just does not work as well as traditional methods. It's a bit like al of the hooha over Kindles and other e-readers - widely predicted to be the deathknell for physical books. What happened? Most people realised it's not as pleasant or effective reading from a screen and these devices are gathering dust, meanwhile book sales are higher than ever. I know that I personally find it almost impossible to absorb factual information off a screen. For example, if I'm learning a new computer language, it takes me far longer if the teaching resource is online - give me a good textbook that I can quickly flip between pages, put notes in etc and I'm happy.
But really all of the expense and societal and personal sacrifice incurred by lockdown and everything since has been utterly squandered. We have a test and trace system that is performs so poorly it's basically useless, no protection for the vulnerable, huge waiting lists for other conditions, whole sectors of the economy "unviable", a ballooning national debt, shrinking tax take and huge swaths of workers wages being subsidised. It's really only a matter of time before this house of cards collapses and the results will make the anguish caused by a disease that is dangerous only to the very old look like a teddy bears picnic.
I'm pretty sure that the government money used on all aspects of lockdown would have been of much better use improving NHS frontline staffing, healthcare quality and facilities, and probably would have achieved the same medium-term result with COVID. With a lot of change to spare.
Now we are going to have a skint country and a skint NHS, which in the long term is going to be incredibly harmful.
I'm sure you've seen the video of the 83-year old lady interviewed on the streets of Bolton, who delivers a damming assessment of the government response to COVID and ends with "...and who's going to be paying for it all in the future? They young. Not me, I'll be dead".
