The Covid-19 alternate UK timeline

Imagine what would have happened in the last year had Boris Johnson not been our prime minister. How different would it have been if David Cameron had still been in charge? Here I imagine such a scenario. I hold no special candle for Cameron although I realise the following will come across a paean to him, which it is not intended to be. It is just that I don’t think there is an alternate universe scenario, out of the trillions available, where Boris Johnson, a blundering, mendacious authoritarian, does a good job. Anyway, here we go on a road to the multiverse…

January 2020

David Cameron, still prime minister of Great Britain after wisely choosing to remain neutral in the Brexit debate of 2016 and therefore not having to resign when the country voted to leave the EU, receives urgent briefings about a new virus that appears to have originated in China. Not distracted by dealing with the fall out of cheating on his wife for at least the fifth time, he gives great attention to the problem.

February 2020

Cameron bans direct flights from the Wuhan district of China and instigates basic testing on arrival for passengers coming in from the rest of China and any other places that officials have indicated may be sending out infected people. This does not mean the virus will not claim victims in Britain, as it has been circulating Europe since late 2019, but it does limit its spread somewhat.

March 2020

With social media and 24-hour news channels going into mad overdrive, Cameron decides that the responsible course of action for government to take is to calm the hysteria rather than stoke it. He launches the government’s Pandemic Preparedness Plan, honed over the last decade and previously endorsed by the WHO - and sticks to it. And so people are advised to wash their hands regularly, avoid large indoor gatherings, stay 1m away from strangers if possible, work from home if that is an option and, most importantly, stay indoors if they have any symptoms that match the virus. With the NHS under great strain for the time of year, Cameron is under huge pressure to follow the likes of Italy into something called a ‘lockdown’, an idea which originated in Communist China a few weeks ago. Cameron holds his nerve, and sticks to the course dictated by 100 years of medical science.

April 2020

After an unpleasant few weeks for him, Cameron’s bravery is rewarded: Covid deaths peak and then fall from the middle of the month, and keep on doing so, in common with Sweden, which also refused to order citizens to stay at home and shut businesses, until late summer. With more and more virus data coming in, the government launches an extensive public information programme, and specific policy initiatives. Several ‘Nightingale’ hospitals have been quickly constructed and are reserved for Covid patients only; unless absolutely necessary, Covid patients are not housed in normal hospitals. With data showing that the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions are most at risk from this virus, various enterprising schemes are actioned - in fact, Cameron charges each of his ministers with coming up with at least three schemes each that will aid the needy. They include: a two-hour supermarket shopping window at a certain time every day reserved for such vulnerable people, enforced by law; a scheme whereby vulnerable people who are unable to get to supermarkets have their groceries delivered free of charge by the state; state support for those in work who have underlying health conditions, allowing them to shield at home if they wish. Doctors’ surgeries are also ordered to reserve two-hour slots every day to see elderly and vulnerable people only, in face-to-face appointments ("We don't want a cancer crisis because people are too afraid to come to the doctors to get properly checked out," Cameron says). Meanwhile, health secretary Matt Hancock is sacked after it is revealed that he planned to discharge Covid patients back into care homes without a Covid test.

May 2020

Public health messaging is in full swing, on every billboard and every TV channel and social media feed. The messages, based on reliable medical evidence, include the call to STAY AT HOME - if you feel unwell. This is rammed home again and again - it is made as socially abhorrent as drink-driving to leave your house if you have Covid symptoms; the government will cover the cost of any work you have lost providing you have a doctor’s note. Otherwise, healthy and at-low-risk people are encouraged to leave their houses to get exercise, fresh air and sunshine, all of which are already known to be beneficial in aiding protection against Covid. Vitamin D is also known to be good at fighting Covid, so the government arranges for every care home in Britain to be given plentiful supplies. Government messaging emphasises that it is highly unlikely that viral transmission can occur outdoors, or that asymptomatic transmission is a driver of the virus, or that the vast majority of healthy people under the age of 65 will suffer severely from it. Government posters at bus stops emphasise that the average person is more likely to die in a car crash than from Covid. “This is not the Black Death!” trills Cameron, but left-wing commentators on Twitter turn this into a meme to mock him by juxtaposing it with footage of people ill in hospital.

June 2020

The government has never bothered with daily press conferences, which it believes will only create an alarmist atmosphere. There are press conferences two or three times a week, but the journalists asking questions are health specialists - political journalists like Laura Kuenssberg or Beth Rigby are not invited, as this is a public health issue, not a political one. At these conferences, Cameron likes to emphasise good news and put death figures in proportion. So while it will be noted how many people have sadly died with Covid (not ‘of’ Covid; the difference is emphasised), it is also noted how many people have sadly died of cancer, heart disease, strokes and other causes. The government puts a smile on the face of the nation by, in common with some other European countries, releasing the figure of how many people have had Covid but have now happily recovered. Those still calling for lockdowns are beaten back by the government’s own detailed cost-benefit analyses, which show in detail that more lives would be lost in the long-term if they were instigated, through job losses, business collapses, depression, suicide, domestic abuse, and other untreated health conditions. The government treats its citizens like adults, not children. It also launches a Let’s Get Super Fit! campaign, encouraging all ages to do more sport, more running and more cycling because, as Cameron says, a fit and healthy nation can more easily fight off infections, and good physical health goes hand in hand with good mental health. Government money is ploughed into various schemes, a move which is branded “nanny state nonsense” by an MP named Boris Johnson.

July 2020

Pressure mounts on the government to mandate masks in public indoor spaces, following successful lobbying of the WHO by political activists. Cameron holds firm: he points to 40 years of clinical studies that have not found compelling evidence for the efficacy of cloth masks in stemming a viral outbreak. He believes that they offer false consolation. He makes the further point that they are not ‘low cost’ - in terms of psychological and social harm they are high cost, as evidence shows. Daily Telegraph columnist Boris Johnson applauds Cameron’s decision, saying that mandating masks would be “nonsensical”. But Johnson says that some of the measures that are currently in place, including a ban on large-scale indoor gatherings, are “a disgrace, an attack on the cherished freedoms of the British people”.

August 2020

Covid rates are now very low in the UK but Cameron, advised by medical experts like Sunetra Gupta, John Lee and Carl Heneghan, puts plans in place for the NHS to cope in the coming months for a possible resurgence of what seems, according to worldwide data, to be a virus strongly linked with seasonality. Thousands of nurses are put on training courses for working in ICU wards so the health service will be prepared when winter arrives. Cameron has rejected plans for widespread testing of healthy people as he is aware of a ‘casedemic’ of false positives that will frighten people, and he has not spent £22 billion on a ‘Track and Trace’ system because he has been advised that it would be pointless in a non-totalitarian state and when a virus is endemic. Looking at the government’s own data he sees that international travel and hospitality are responsible for just a tiny fraction of Covid infections, so has no plans to shut either down; he realises in a grim year people still need some pleasures.

September 2020 

Just as Cameron raged at ‘green crap’, he now rages at the ‘Covid death within 28 days of a positive test crap’, and the time period is reduced to one week. Under his government, it has remained the case that two doctors have to sign the death certificate, not one, as happened in a loopy alternate reality from March 2020. The government heavily promotes its 'Myth Buster' website, which focuses on things like the lack of evidence for Covid being spread by fomite transmission (germs left on objects), to calm the populace.

October 2020

Officials seek to reassure young people worried about the virus. ‘You are literally at more danger of carking it by putting your trousers on!’ goes one light-hearted public health advert with a cartoon of a purple pair of flares. It is criticised for frivolity, but statisticians point out that it is technically correct - more teenagers die every year putting their trousers on (and, presumably, falling over and hitting their head) than would die in the same period from Covid-related illness. When Piers Morgan rages that Covid is like Spanish Flu, new health secretary Iain Duncan Smith calmly comes out with the following: “The median age of victim of the Spanish Flu was 28; with Covid it is 82. Spanish Flu claimed 3% of the world’s population; Covid has claimed around 0.04%, and 94% of those had an average of 2.6 co-morbidities. Covid has an average survival rate of 99.75%, much higher for those under 65.” Such measured words help to reassure the nation and dampen mental health troubles that many had been risk of succumbing to.

November 2020

There has been a vaccines breakthrough! Cameron is overjoyed and promises that the roll-out will begin very soon and when those in vulnerable groups have been vaccinated all restrictions - mainly still a ban on large-scale indoor gatherings and mandated surgical mask-wearing for care workers in close contact with elderly people - and strong advice - such as working from home if you can and avoiding meeting inside with elderly relatives unless they wish otherwise - will be abandoned.

December 2020

Covid cases are on the rise, seemingly replacing flu as the season’s main respiratory illness, but an under-pressure Cameron says it would be ‘inhuman’ to cancel Christmas. So he doesn’t.

January 2021

Schools return as scheduled on January 5 - children have not missed a single day of schooling since March and, like Sweden, we have seen zero Covid deaths of children and very, very little serious illness, with teachers no more likely to become unwell than workers in other professions. Nightingale hospitals, staffed by experienced doctors and trained-up nurses, cope well with the modest increase in those sick with Covid. 

February 2021

Herd immunity is nearly upon us, brought about by a year of fit people getting a mild dose of the virus and a successful vaccine roll-out. Cameron cheers up the nation by saying “we’re nearly out of this - expect complete normality very, very soon”. Professor Neil Ferguson, who was sacked by Cameron nearly a year before for his consistently wrong and alarmist computer modelling, is rumoured to be touting for work on ITV’s Good Morning Britain as the ‘resident, specie Prof’. Patrick Vallance has retired to spend more time with his GSK shares and Chris Whitty has returned to his home planet, Mars.

March 2021

With 99% of vulnerable people vaccinated and widespread immunity achieved, Britain returns to exactly how it was a year before. David Cameron apologises to the nation for the ‘traumatic’ times and the small dip in economic growth, the small rise in public spending for the likes of the Nightingale hospitals and providing free food deliveries and vitamin D for the vulnerable ("But I’m sure you will all admit it has been money well spent"), and promises a brighter future. “Some nations have - rather curiously I think - gone down the road of ‘lockdowns’, ‘vaccine passports’, stopping basic freedoms, and making it illegal for healthy people to see other healthy people, but I am glad to say that we have not done that, and remain Great Britain, a nation dedicated to the notion that people are free unless otherwise expressly prohibited. Napoleon did not defeat us, we defeated him.”