Coronavirus outbreak

[Tanis8472]

I understand people traveled from the midlands to Poole and Bournemouth.Cant think of anything worse than sitting in a car for god knows now long just to sit on a jam packed beach.

Just seen on the news Matt Hancock is warning we will close beaches if public don’t social distance.

We shall fight them on the beaches........

 

[marinyork]

I don't think anyone would want to let the government off the hook, but you are right - sensible action by the public could get the pandemic reasonably under control without government interference. The stupidity of those who ignore the rules is made worse by the dithering and incompetent response of the government from the beginning.

One of the failings in the public health message I feel is that of time. The scientific advisors have always said in whatever environment the risk is proportional to time, disregarding the many other factors. Alcohol and changed behaviours has been commented on too.

A lot of time in the media and on these forums is rightly spent talking about proximity, even if it's outside in many cases.

I feel that the message on time hasn't been clear. A lot of these beach or park outings with people outside your household are often for 3/6/9 hours. I get the feeling some weekends/furlough they are repeated multiple times. I think that a health message needs to get across that a day could be as much as say a month's worth of risk in other contexts.

 

[marinyork]

If the staff have been exposed, surely they should all go home and isolate for 14 days, 14 cases will be the tip of the iceberg, give it a couple of days and 14 could become 126 quite easily, going on the assumption that 1 person will infect 3 others.

They will be split into high and low risk and the high risk quarantined for 14 days.

In reality they should all go home. This is the problem with the track and trace, if it remains open for some workers with asymptomatic cases it slowly belts around the factory and the people who are assumed to have started it may not be and it does several loops of the factory. It's also the nonsense of track and trace. In this setting every single person needs testing and if negative they also need to do some more a few days later.

 

[mjr]

One of the failings in the public health message I feel is that of time. The scientific advisors have always said in whatever environment the risk is proportional to time, disregarding the many other factors. [...] I feel that the message on time hasn't been clear.

Agreed. A lot of scientific advice articles have been clear that your aim should be to reduce the risk of accumulating sufficient virus to infect you, so if someone breathing is expelling virus particles at a constant rate per minute that reach 1m, then it would be riskier to spend two minutes 1m away than one minute. But that really hasn't come into play in this country's public messaging, yoyoing between overzealous absolutes ("stay at home") and vague nonsense ("stay alert").

Some countries set a maximum permitted time for being in a shop (30 minutes in one example). I suspect you were unlikely to be fined unless you did something stupid like set up camp in a supermarket, but it was there as part of the public messaging.

England never did, probably because Boris doesn't want to upset businesses if at all reasonably possible and the absolute farking shambles at Morrisons left me stood in the checkout queue snaking through the baby clothes aisles for almost half an hour on my last visit there.

 

[marinyork]

Agreed. A lot of scientific advice articles have been clear that your aim should be to reduce the risk of accumulating sufficient virus to infect you, so if someone breathing is expelling virus particles at a constant rate per minute that reach 1m, then it would be riskier to spend two minutes 1m away than one minute. But that really hasn't come into play in this country's public messaging, yoyoing between overzealous absolutes ("stay at home") and vague nonsense ("stay alert").

Some countries set a maximum permitted time for being in a shop (30 minutes in one example). I suspect you were unlikely to be fined unless you did something stupid like set up camp in a supermarket, but it was there as part of the public messaging.

England never did, probably because Boris doesn't want to upset businesses if at all reasonably possible and the absolute farking shambles at Morrisons left me stood in the checkout queue snaking through the baby clothes aisles for almost half an hour on my last visit there.

The SAGE advice, the time aspect is prominent in it.

Stay at home was fine, but people were only ever going to stick to it for weeks before lockdown fatigue set in.

It's important for those public health officials to mention the time with the roasting temperatures, summer here and still a gigantic swathe of the population on furlough and 'nominally' a lot of/more time on their hands and those desperate to see people with it sounding like everything is open as normal.

 

[Joey Shabadoo]

I wonder how much the message is ignored because of who is giving it? We know there are a lot of people don't like the Tories and would maybe resent being told what to do by them. Similarly if I were being ordered to do things by a Corbyn/McDonnell/Abbott government there's a strong chance I would have just thought "fark off". Certainly after the Cummings debacle the number of serious breaches of lockdown seemed to increase showing a lack of respect for the government.

I remember thinking at the outset the daily briefing should have been from a civil servant - rather like Ian wotsisname who had the task of reading out the daily losses in the Falklands War. It makes the message apolitical.

On the other hand, Sturgeon is seeing a growth in approval because she has delivered the message personally every day and took ownership of the crisis. A lot of people respect that.

 

[marinyork]

I wonder how much the message is ignored because of who is giving it? We know there are a lot of people don't like the Tories and would maybe resent being told what to do by them. Similarly if I were being ordered to do things by a Corbyn/McDonnell/Abbott government there's a strong chance I would have just thought "fark off". Certainly after the Cummings debacle the number of serious breaches of lockdown seemed to increase showing a lack of respect for the government.

I remember thinking at the outset the daily briefing should have been from a civil servant - rather like Ian wotsisname who had the task of reading out the daily losses in the Falklands War. It makes the message apolitical.

On the other hand, Sturgeon is seeing a growth in approval because she has delivered the message personally every day and took ownership of the crisis. A lot of people respect that.

Are you talking about Scotland or in general?

It isn't the 1960s with doffed caps and deference, people haven't had 'respect' for governments for decades. It isn't Mr Chamberlain waving his bit of paper or Mr MacMillian sat in downing street for the first interview pf a prime minister on tv.

I'm not sure it has a political persuasion in the very specific party sense, people want clarity. The people wanted clarity so badly they decided to social distance and wind down activities before Boris closed the pubs and then told people to stay home. People may not want to be told what to do by politicians, but some of those people will not want to be told what to do by anyone and will stick two fingers up at their families and neighbours. In the lack of clarity people will make up their own rules. So around 90%+ of the population are believed to have not had coronavirus and managed to survive Feb, March, April, May and June. The virus is now at lower levels. These clowns aren't telling me anything useful. Do what you want innit.

The UK government seems to have cottoned on that the daily briefings were counter productive and abolished them. This should have happened weeks sooner and format changed. Or maybe it really did think back to normal, better get rid. The public probably liked a couple of Boris's rambles, but after that I'm not sure what they got out of it. The UK ones it did get frigging stupid with Matt's targets and repetitive questions from journalists.

The press conference could have been The Whitty or The Vallance.

The UK government also doesn't have the guts to say that it's priority is the economy now and why.

 

[mjr]

I wonder how much the message is ignored because of who is giving it? We know there are a lot of people don't like the Tories and would maybe resent being told what to do by them. Similarly if I were being ordered to do things by a Corbyn/McDonnell/Abbott government there's a strong chance I would have just thought "fark off". Certainly after the Cummings debacle the number of serious breaches of lockdown seemed to increase showing a lack of respect for the government.

I remember thinking at the outset the daily briefing should have been from a civil servant - rather like Ian wotsisname who had the task of reading out the daily losses in the Falklands War. It makes the message apolitical.

On the other hand, Sturgeon is seeing a growth in approval because she has delivered the message personally every day and took ownership of the crisis. A lot of people respect that.

1. Not everyone is as party political as you sound from that. I've voted for most of the non extreme parties at some point (although often from a limited choice out in the sticks) and I don't criticise this government for being Tories. I criticise them for being rather awful.

2. The Cummings effect isn't party political either. If Campbell has done something that bad and Blair had stuck by him, we'd've seen similar, I think.

3. I said months ago that the press briefings should have been officer only. So I'd also agree with criticising this Government for being control freaks desperate for their fifteen minutes on prime time BBC 1, but basically variously clueless, innumerate or hypocritical.

 

[MntnMan62]

I think the UK is still "running too hot" in terms of absolute new daily deaths and so shouldn't be unlocking even more - or at least not unlocking indoor activities. If this carried on at current rates, the UK's published "deaths per capita" will overtake Belgium in 3½ weeks despite the suspected disparity in reporting (UK 40% underreported, Belgium 0%).

I agree. And you guys and gals should take the lesson from the US. All three states that have "reopened", Florida, Texas and Arizona, have all shut down the bars and restaurants and hot spot areas due to a spike in new cases as well as record setting numbers that have not been seen ever. If that doesn't tell you something, then I don't know what does. Incredulous that anyone would think that it would be possible to open anything up if there is no vaccine and no new treatment methods that helpt to mitigate the spread of the virus. The stark reality is NOTHING HAS CHANGED. Unfortunately our red states and our screaming orange sphincter muscle in the White House are too mentally brain dead to understand very simple and basic concepts. After all, who would have thought that if you test more, you would find more cases??? Duh. Can't fix stupid.

 

[SkipdiverJohn]

Stay at home was fine, but people were only ever going to stick to it for weeks before lockdown fatigue set in.

The lockdown was only ever a brief window to give the government the breathing space to ramp up their intensive care bed capacity. Anyone who thinks that the population is going to tolerate not being able to go about their normal routines until the virus eventually disappears is frankly deluded. If the government have got behavioral scientists advising them they will know the longer this goes on the more fed up people will get and the less notice they will take. Close contact between people is already increasing massively, in shops, in the street, in the park, on the beach, and at work. Plenty of bus passengers are ignoring the mask edict, and either don't have one or don't wear it as intended. The genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in now summer is here!. What happens next is going to depend very much how much the real infection numbers up until now compare with the official ones. My own belief is that they are massively understating the true numbers, and a substantial proportion of the population have already been infected, so the virus now has a significantly smaller target audience left to infect.

A second wave of some magnitude is inevitable and in fact, is really necessary, in order to get the worst of it over and done with before the winter flu season kicks in. Trying to actually stop the virus is futile and pushing it further and further back in the calendar simply means the NHS will be overwhelmed in six months time instead, when it still has all the coronavirus cases - plus the usual flu/pneumonia/broken bones from falls etc to deal with.

 

[gbb]

One of the failings in the public health message I feel is that of time. The scientific advisors have always said in whatever environment the risk is proportional to time, disregarding the many other factors. Alcohol and changed behaviours has been commented on too.

A lot of time in the media and on these forums is rightly spent talking about proximity, even if it's outside in many cases.

I feel that the message on time hasn't been clear. A lot of these beach or park outings with people outside your household are often for 3/6/9 hours. I get the feeling some weekends/furlough they are repeated multiple times. I think that a health message needs to get across that a day could be as much as say a month's worth of risk in other contexts.

And that's one of my concerns. I did the official antibody test, negative result, and one of the many questions it asks in the enclosed questionnaire was...
Of the people you have been closer than 2 metres in the last 24 hours (not exactly but you get the idea) how many did you spend 5 minutes or more with ?

Now I work in a very busy factory where lots of money has been spent and systems put in place but i come into contact with many many people less than 2 metres away, however hard you try, mine is a very fluid job, lots of movement between lines and people. Some contact can be around 5 minutes but most are less....but I'm coming into contact with maybe 100 people daily, at less than 2 metres, that's all got to increase the chances enormously.
(Its my opinion, while the company has spent lots, put lots of effort into distancing etc, it simply cannot achieve a safe environment and should have reduced its output to meet the safe environment it's workforce needs. Spanish company, very aggressive commercially, fat chance....in fact its picked up more work because responsible companies who did reduce orders...have now possibly made a commercial faux pas and our company picks up the business...at even more cost to its workforce. Its brutal reality, doing the right thing can be a mistake for companies.

 

[MntnMan62]

Lockdown fatigue is nothing more than another name for human weakness. No excuse when lives are on the line. I won't budge from that position. All you have to do is look at what is happening in the US right now. People either need to grow a pair or move to Russia.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

My own belief is that they are massively understating the true numbers, and a substantial proportion of the population have already been infected, so the virus now has a significantly smaller target audience left to infect.

I'm not sure why you believe this, but it's incorrect.

Anti body testing is used to measure the proportion of people who have been infected.

It's about 5-10%

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...ypilot/12june2020#antibody-tests-for-covid-19

 

[deptfordmarmoset]

This BBC interview - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kfv0 - not yet available but it'll be up soon - with Neil Ferguson was very interesting and highly reflective.

 

[deptfordmarmoset]

Plus the suggestion that the trend of falling incidence of covid has ceased falling here - https://covid19.joinzoe.com/post/covid-incidence-stable