It’s the only reasonable course of action.
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I just need to be told what to do and I’ll do it, I don’t need this build up.
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Why is he concentrating so much on Christmas?!?! This is embarrassing.
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If you have as many kids as Boris Christmas must be an expensive time of year.
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I’m so worried that the only purpose of this is to allow people to get together for Christmas. If there is another lockdown it has to be to get testing, tracing and the NHS (including PPE) ready with full support for people and businesses.
And why wait until Thursday, and why midnight? They’ve missed the school holidays.
And what will happen here in Wales at the end of next week? Will we stay in lockdown if the UK picture is still horrendous?
What I don’t get is why we’re not following New Zealand, China and Taiwan and just jump on every case and test and isolate hard. Looking (from afar admittedly) at those countries they seem to be relatively normal, but very strict when they need to be.
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12billion to Serco and no useable track and trace.
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It has worked wonders in NZ, I’d say push for it.
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Rates of chlamydia highest since records began.
Clap for the NHS.
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That probably has some influence by the fact that now is one of the periods in NHS history with more testing being done. Still… food for thought.
Me neither. There have been mistakes here and there, but the tackle hard and early message from auntie Jacinda has worked wonders (and helped her win the elections by a landslide, btw).
Seeing how the rest of the world is doing (particularly Europe and the US), you are right, life is nearly normal. The only difference here from a year ago right now is having to sign up entering businesses using your phone app, or manually, for traceability. Besides the border controls, that is.
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I’m under no illusion we could have been a New Zealand. To do so would have meant acting extremely early without much news of other countries except China. By the time Italy and Spain were hit big we were already past the point of when NZ locked down. At best, we would have been an Ireland.
To follow the NZ timeline we would have had to close all borders by mid-Feb and lockdown by end of Feb. I don’t think many would have called that at the time. The calls for lockdown were starting to come early March. If we had acted reasonably, we would have locked down on March 12th, as Ireland did (and even then we were slightly ahead in progression at that time).
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We were mostly okay in June. We’d still have had a second peak in September (I predicted “third week in September” back in March, which was exactly right) but an actual lockdown can bring us back down to almost no cases anytime we do it.
However, that means testing at airports if we don’t close them, and absolutely definitely shutting Universities and schools. Since we’re not doing that, today’s announcement is probably a total waste of time.
And if we do get cases down to almost zero, we then have to actually isolate those people to stop it coming back up. Which we’re also choosing not to do.
If you’re only concerned with money, the two options are:
- Take the pain of total lockdown, pay people and businesses 100% of what they need for about 4 weeks and you will have zero cases at the end of it, or
- Let business stay open, kinda, so you don’t have to pay them and let people keep going to restaurants, kinda, although you know that indoor spaces for longer than an hour are lethal and this won’t do anything to bring the R number down, so the virus stays around for months
If you’re looking at those two and thinking that number 2 actually ends up being MORE expensive as this drags on for a year, you would be totally right. It’s also catastrophic if you care about the infection rate.
So I’m not super optimistic about today’s lockdown. It’s needed, it was needed weeks ago, it’ll work a bit even with schools open, but at the end of it we still don’t have a track and isolate system to stop cases going up again.
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I’d wager lockdowns will become incrementally less effective each time. The first lockdown people (mostly) took seriously. People held down because there was a promise of relief afterwards. That never really came. Now morale is low, we’ve had 6 months of various restrictions, it’s clear there’s no end in sight afterall, and it’s coming into winter. We’re going to get more people breaking the rules this time. Enforcement is going to be a huge problem.
A perfect lockdown would be great, but in practice there’s a lot of holes in the net. Rates will go down, but I highly doubt they’ll get really low. We’ll continue to see circulation through the community at some level.
We had our chance with the first lockdown, and we blew it. Probably jumped too soon and partisan cronyism destroyed the preparation. We won’t get anything like that level of commitment again.
Time will tell!
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I’m still confused as to why Japan seems to be an outlier. No lockdowns, plenty of stupid people being stupid, even earlier entry of infection into the general population.
It does seem like the US/UK fatalistic take is unreasonable. There must be some middle ground between New Zealand and UK outcomes, and I think dramatically better results could have been achieved without drastic and early lockdowns.
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Yeah, that’s sadly very true. The problem with “lockdown” is enforcing it, and the UK public won’t play very well.
But I think there’s a big difference between going as far as you reasonably can and putting “Eat out to help out” at the end of August when you KNOW that’s the week you need to be tightening up to stop a big September peak.
We had a good rating for pandemic plans from the Global Health Security Index (even after the balls-up that was the 2016 Cygnus) and then we didn’t follow any of them. Kept airports open (18 million visitors from Jan to March) talked about “Herd immunity” which is a thing where the vulnerable don’t get it because everyone else is immune and it can’t travel - NOT a thing where the vulnerable die because you deliberately expose the entire population.
Sorry. Ex-scientist with medically isolating parents here, I haven’t been outdoors much since Feb and another “lockdown but not Universities” has me annoyed. Any action should have been three weeks ago, even if was a weak UK version.
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I honestly think it’s related to the Dominick Cummings incident and the lack of any sanction. It just set the tone from the outset that people in authority didn’t need to follow the rules.
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I think at that point people were itching for any excuse. Cummings, then BLM protests, then the beaches. It all came in such quick succession. If it wasn’t that, it would have been something else - well, the beaches seemed like the inevitable breaking point regardless of anything else.
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We didn’t have Cummings incidents over here and people are still very tired of following the rules.
We have anti-maskers and anti-everything demonstrations. But those aren’t the biggest problem because they are a vocal but still a minority.
But all those who tell me how careful they are while they are clearly not… all those like my usually so very very sensible family member who insisted that they had to celebrate their birthday in a restaurant with 25 guests.
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I think, from what I can gather, it’s a cultural thing. I remember in the 80s hearing friends of ours that had visited saying that you could see many Japanese people at peak hour used masks when using the tube.
In Europe, and definitely in Southern Europe where I come from, we are way less conscious for the general public or the greater good. ‘Rules are great until they affect me’. Put on top of that that the majority of people in Spain live in flats, and share lifts, plus we are more “touchy” in general, and there you go. No amount of Lockdowns or enforcements work to the degree you would expect.
Now, idiots are everywhere. I’m not saying Japan or any other society is perfect, far from it. But that explains part of it.
And there goes an example… Birthdays happen every year. Do we need really to celebrate that way in these days? Obviously for most people not. But the outliers (to put it nicely) will keep the situation being bad.
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Uhhh… I think I need a haircut before Thursday
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