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Should we go back into lockdown at this point?

Is it time for a second national lockdown?


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brick60000

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Because cases of the "terrible virus" (to use Matt Hancock's words) are increasing and we must do something.

Closing pubs at 10pm is something, therefore we must do it.

I think I read your tone as slightly sarcastic there, apologies if I'm reading it wrong.

Exactly, it very much feels like hospitality is being scapegoated when the real problem lies in education, workplaces & care homes, but its too controversial to do anything there, or they're too incompetent to do anything. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of where cases in workplaces are coming from, if one exists. How many are from hospitality, and how many from other sectors?

Edit:
Another one from the Daily Mail, oh dear Boris....!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/...ies-Doom-heres-speech-Boris-Johnson-give.html
 
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brick60000

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But would you not accept that education is more important than any of those other sectors? Therefore we may have to accept that and trim elsewhere?

I'm not sure. I wouldn't disagree that people being educated is more important than going for a pint.

However, I'm not sure it's more important than the jobs of those that will be lost by those not working. Pubs often have staff on casual contracts, or at least not on an exact set of hours. If the furlough scheme isn't extended, that's the pay of those who would have worked post-10pm gone.

What's the point in educating our children for them to have to fight over jobs that don't exist?

Equally, being encouraged to work from home for longer will have a detrimental impact on small companies. Speaking personally, most of my department frequents an independent cafe next door, and they've lost our business since March.

I'd accept the arguement more if cases from these areas were even remotely close to those from workplaces/education.
 

ainsworth74

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For discussion of the announcement made by Boris Johnson this afternoon please see this thread.
 

Huntergreed

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Nicola Sturgeon said today that the idea of a 2-week “circuit breaker“ full lockdown is being seriously considered in Scotland, and advised us that the October holidays this year should be used to allow us to minimise our social contact and to not go overseas unless absolutely essential. Hopefully this doesn’t come to any fruition :(
 

DB

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Nicola Sturgeon said today that the idea of a 2-week “circuit breaker“ full lockdown is being seriously considered in Scotland, and advised us that the October holidays this year should be used to allow us to minimise our social contact and to not go overseas unless absolutely essential. Hopefully this doesn’t come to any fruition :(

Why can these people not understand that this simply won't work? At most, it'll cause a blip in the line on a graph.
 

kez19

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Nicola Sturgeon said today that the idea of a 2-week “circuit breaker“ full lockdown is being seriously considered in Scotland, and advised us that the October holidays this year should be used to allow us to minimise our social contact and to not go overseas unless absolutely essential. Hopefully this doesn’t come to any fruition :(

2 Week lockdown it would get dragged out further again, it’s not as if we ain’t been round this before...

I wonder what these "circuit breaker" lockdowns look like in terms of rules.

Guessing either partial or expect everything closed except shops (just own opinion here)
 

bramling

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I wonder what these "circuit breaker" lockdowns look like in terms of rules.

I’d have thought the idea would be for something pretty strict, in other words only essential work (which would in fact be stricter than in March). Otherwise what is two weeks going to do which three months didn’t?
 

Scotrail12

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If it doesn't even allow exercise and/or mandates a 5 mile role (or anything similar), N*cola St*rgeon can sod off.
 

kez19

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You need to get tested with that cough :)

True! I meant to have sneezed than cough lol

I see Boris uses circuit breaker, I wonder if Sturgeon will use brake pedal? ... (or is that just wishful thinking?) lol

I’d have thought the idea would be for something pretty strict, in other words only essential work (which would in fact be stricter than in March). Otherwise what is two weeks going to do which three months didn’t?


Flatten the curve? Save Lives/Saves the NHS? I'm guessing here but I can't see it doing much good either!

If it doesn't even allow exercise and/or mandates a 5 mile role (or anything similar), N*cola St*rgeon can sod off.


If she was meant to mandate a 5 mile radius we all know what will happen between Glasgow and the central belt (a minority), travel down south but everyone else gets punished (again its not something we ain't seen before), it'll be more of a soft approach from that part of Scotland but everyone else the further north you go will be stricter. As people have mentioned in terms of numbers between Glasgow and the Lothians its a soft approach but be Aberdeen shut you down...
 
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Nicola Sturgeon said today that the idea of a 2-week “circuit breaker“ full lockdown is being seriously considered in Scotland, and advised us that the October holidays this year should be used to allow us to minimise our social contact and to not go overseas unless absolutely essential. Hopefully this doesn’t come to any fruition :(

What she actually said was no decision made as yet but keeping it under review

From the First Ministers statement to the Scottish Parliament:

I also want to touch briefly today on an issue that has been the subject of media speculation in recent days - namely the possibility of a so called circuit breaker, timed to coincide with the October school break, and during which people would be given much more comprehensive advice to stay at home.
The Scottish Government has not made any decision at this stage to implement such a policy - however, we are actively keeping it under review.
What I would say to people now is this. Please think of the October break as an opportunity to further limit social interaction, particularly indoors.
And, given that this is a global pandemic, please do not book travel overseas for the October break if it is not essential.
 

lkpridgeon

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With the fines for lack of compliance beginning to creep up and the potential for businesses being told to completely shut shop for not enforcing the law on their customers/hanging a stupid QR code poster. It just shouts out to me that the regulations were indeed unenforcable and now they're just grasping at straws as people have stopped listening.

I say go for it! It will let them get it out of their system and prove that doing so won't achieve anything. I severely doubt people would actually go along with it for a second time so trying it again would be... Futile.

Hopefully the resultant mass civil disobedience would finally act as a final kick in the teeth to the powers that be and get them to drop the premolition that we can actually control/wipe out the virus hence putting us back on the path of returning to normal*.

*without petty unenforceable restrictions.
 

Richard Scott

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Why can these people not understand that this simply won't work? At most, it'll cause a blip in the line on a graph.
This is what is so frustrating. Is it me being stupid or isn't it blindingly obvious that all the politicians do is delay the inevitable in some vain hope the virus will go away or the vaccine will come good?
 

kez19

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This is what is so frustrating. Is it me being stupid or isn't it blindingly obvious that all the politicians do is delay the inevitable in some vain hope the virus will go away or the vaccine will come good?

Clutching at straws sake is what I think, but science and politicians and all that...
 

haggishunter

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Why can these people not understand that this simply won't work? At most, it'll cause a blip in the line on a graph.

Think the idea is that it would be better to have a downwards blip, than a school holiday travel induced surge. Uncontrolled travel within the UK at the height of summer as things begun to open up is a significant part of why we are where we are. Scotland would have been better off having initially opened up hospitality and tourism as a large bubble with limited travel in and out, but able to sustain more normalised opening within Scotland.

Either the whole UK went for very low/zero covid, or internal borders needed to be restricted - neither happened, so the sacrifice of a longer lockdown in Scotland and Wales has been partly nullified. (It's not totally been, because despite a higher R number in Scotland, the lower base means things are tripling every 3 weeks vs doubling every 6-7 days in the UK as a whole).
 

The Ham

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Think the idea is that it would be better to have a downwards blip, than a school holiday travel induced surge. Uncontrolled travel within the UK at the height of summer as things begun to open up is a significant part of why we are where we are. Scotland would have been better off having initially opened up hospitality and tourism as a large bubble with limited travel in and out, but able to sustain more normalised opening within Scotland.

Either the whole UK went for very low/zero covid, or internal borders needed to be restricted - neither happened, so the sacrifice of a longer lockdown in Scotland and Wales has been partly nullified. (It's not totally been, because despite a higher R number in Scotland, the lower base means things are tripling every 3 weeks vs doubling every 6-7 days in the UK as a whole).

Tripping every 3 weeks you say, well compared to some areas that's huge growth, the last 3 sets of weeks of days for my local area are 6, 6 and 7 so over 2 weeks it's increased by 20% from a fairly low base.
In terms of the South East/South West it might be lower than some, but with significant numbers of areas with less than 10/100,000 and most of the rest being less than 20/100,000 there's unlikely to be many where there's been a tripling in the last 3 weeks.

Whilst there could be hidden cases due to testing not being able to keep up with demand, I suspect that there's areas where there's doubling every 4 days or less to offset against those areas with very low cases.
 

DB

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Professor John Edmunds seems to be saying that we should have another full lockdown.

No mention of an exit strategy though - so what is actually the purpose of having another lockdown?

Of course, it's likely that herd immunity will arrive eventually, even without a vaccine, but certain people see determined to stretch this out for as long as possible, thereby causing massive damage to pretty much every other aspect of society.

There also seems to be an attempt to re-write the reasons for the March lockdown (or we were lied to at the time - could be either):
Prof John Edmunds, a member of the UK's Sage scientific advisory group but speaking to BBC Radio 4 in a personal capacity, said "we haven’t learned from our mistake" in delaying action in March and "we’re unfortunately about to repeat it".

This implies that the purpose of lockdowns is to get case numbers down whenever required. In March, we were told that it was to allow the NHS to build up capacity - which was done, and much of it was never used, but still remains in place.
 

Huntergreed

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No mention of an exit strategy though - so what is actually the purpose of having another lockdown?

Of course, it's likely that herd immunity will arrive eventually, even without a vaccine, but certain people see determined to stretch this out for as long as possible, thereby causing massive damage to pretty much every other aspect of society.

There also seems to be an attempt to re-write the reasons for the March lockdown (or we were lied to at the time - could be either):


This implies that the purpose of lockdowns is to get case numbers down whenever required. In March, we were told that it was to allow the NHS to build up capacity - which was done, and much of it was never used, but still remains in place.
It does seem that everyone thinks we must continue to suppress this virus permanently, and I imagine the greater public view is that we must do so until a vaccine. There are many concerns about putting so much money and effort into such a strategy, but nobody seems to even consider them. For instance, what if we do not find a working, safe vaccine in the near future? These restrictions cannot go on for years, yet with the current public attitude, without a vaccine, it seems that would be what's expected. I just don't get it.
 

takno

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Think the idea is that it would be better to have a downwards blip, than a school holiday travel induced surge. Uncontrolled travel within the UK at the height of summer as things begun to open up is a significant part of why we are where we are. Scotland would have been better off having initially opened up hospitality and tourism as a large bubble with limited travel in and out, but able to sustain more normalised opening within Scotland.

Either the whole UK went for very low/zero covid, or internal borders needed to be restricted - neither happened, so the sacrifice of a longer lockdown in Scotland and Wales has been partly nullified. (It's not totally been, because despite a higher R number in Scotland, the lower base means things are tripling every 3 weeks vs doubling every 6-7 days in the UK as a whole).
According to the Zoe data most of Scotland current appears to have higher prevalence of Covid than most of England, and in spite of a rather questionable claim from Sturgeon over the summer it's never been a great deal better.

Put simply, if the R rate over a period is higher then you will double faster. If that relationship doesn't hold then either your R value is wrong or your prevalence stats are wrong.
 

brad465

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The argument about whether the initial idea of pursuing herd immunity being controversial has surfaced again with this landing page report:



As the UK introduces fresh restrictions on social contact to curb the spread of coronavirus, controversy continues to rage about whether the government had initially considered trying a very different approach.

At the start of the pandemic, the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, spoke about "herd immunity" - the idea that once enough of a population had been exposed to the virus, they would build up natural immunity to it.

Sir Patrick and the government have both insisted this was never official policy. The government also denies there was any delay in locking down the country, as some critics have suggested.

Emails obtained by the BBC reveal the alarm among the government's top scientific advisers at the reaction to Sir Patrick's words.

In one email from March, Sir Patrick asks for help to "calm down" academics who have expressed anger at his repeated references to herd immunity and the delays in announcing a lockdown.

Even if this was a genuine proposal, I seriously doubt it would have lasted very long, regardless of how right/wrong such a strategy is, because many other countries in Europe were already in lockdown at this point and we would have succumb to serious pressure from them and many in this country demanding we do the same, where as our Government can't easily think what the best approach is for itself, it's easy for them to concede.
 

bramling

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It does seem that everyone thinks we must continue to suppress this virus permanently, and I imagine the greater public view is that we must do so until a vaccine. There are many concerns about putting so much money and effort into such a strategy, but nobody seems to even consider them. For instance, what if we do not find a working, safe vaccine in the near future? These restrictions cannot go on for years, yet with the current public attitude, without a vaccine, it seems that would be what's expected. I just don't get it.

This is the problem when the politicians aren’t being honest with people. By now the narrative should be “we cannot eliminate this”, and there should have been a politician brave enough to properly explain herd immunity - which has unfortunately now been allowed to become a dirty term over the last year, when in reality it’s the only solution - be it whether it arises naturally or with the help of a vaccine.

The *only* value of a lockdown is either to try to eliminate, as China attempted, and this would presumably only be viable in the very early stages of a virus before mass spread had occurred. We are way past that point now. Or to buy time to prevent a health service being overwhelmed, but even this is only viable as a short-term measure.

I’d only tolerate a lockdown if (1) we were in danger of a very high number of excess Covid deaths AND (2) a vaccine was imminent as an exit strategy. And I don’t mean a vague possibility as it is now, I mean a vaccine is confirmed and we’re simply waiting for it to be administered. Neither of those conditions applies at the moment.
 

MikeWM

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No mention of an exit strategy though - so what is actually the purpose of having another lockdown?

...

This implies that the purpose of lockdowns is to get case numbers down whenever required. In March, we were told that it was to allow the NHS to build up capacity - which was done, and much of it was never used, but still remains in place.


Exactly so. I think we need to step back for a moment and try to work out exactly what it is we are trying to achieve.

The original point of all the restrictions was, as you say, to give time to add capacity to the NHS so it wasn't overwhelmed. Somehow that seems to have morphed over the last 6 months into 'we need to prevent people from dying of this particular disease, at all costs'. They are two entirely different things, and while the former makes a degree of sense even though I was opposed to it personally, the latter is, to be blunt, insane.

Note that even the doom-mongering on Monday was saying that there *may* be 200 deaths a day from the virus (mostly the elderly and already ill). That's not great, but for a new and *fairly* nasty virus, that's not terribly unusual or unprecedented, given about 1500 people die every day anyway. The damage we're causing to our society, economy and health to try and cut that number is dramatically and dangerously disproportionate to that risk.

So we all have to ask ourselves - what are we even trying to achieve now, and if we can work that out, why?
 

packermac

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Exactly so. I think we need to step back for a moment and try to work out exactly what it is we are trying to achieve.

The original point of all the restrictions was, as you say, to give time to add capacity to the NHS so it wasn't overwhelmed. Somehow that seems to have morphed over the last 6 months into 'we need to prevent people from dying of this particular disease, at all costs'. They are two entirely different things, and while the former makes a degree of sense even though I was opposed to it personally, the latter is, to be blunt, insane.

Note that even the doom-mongering on Monday was saying that there *may* be 200 deaths a day from the virus (mostly the elderly and already ill). That's not great, but for a new and *fairly* nasty virus, that's not terribly unusual or unprecedented, given about 1500 people die every day anyway. The damage we're causing to our society, economy and health to try and cut that number is dramatically and dangerously disproportionate to that risk.

So we all have to ask ourselves - what are we even trying to achieve now, and if we can work that out, why?
So which politician of whatever political persuasion is going to stand up and give the public the message "That's not great, but for a new and *fairly* nasty virus, that's not terribly unusual or unprecedented, given about 1500 people die every day anyway."
That would be a totally unacceptable message to the masses in 2020, otherwise why in more normal times develop drugs to ensure people live longer even though health and social care around the world can not cope with those longer living people.
 

MikeWM

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So which politician of whatever political persuasion is going to stand up and give the public the message "That's not great, but for a new and *fairly* nasty virus, that's not terribly unusual or unprecedented, given about 1500 people die every day anyway."
That would be a totally unacceptable message to the masses in 2020, otherwise why in more normal times develop drugs to ensure people live longer even though health and social care around the world can not cope with those longer living people.

So you're saying the politicians are too weak and feeble to tell us the truth, so instead need to spin a web of deceit that causes significantly worse damage than the original problem?

They wanted the job, they need to grow a backbone. Politicians in the past didn't pretend we were immortal - look at how the serious outbreaks in the 1950s and 1960s were handled.
 

bramling

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Exactly so. I think we need to step back for a moment and try to work out exactly what it is we are trying to achieve.

The original point of all the restrictions was, as you say, to give time to add capacity to the NHS so it wasn't overwhelmed. Somehow that seems to have morphed over the last 6 months into 'we need to prevent people from dying of this particular disease, at all costs'. They are two entirely different things, and while the former makes a degree of sense even though I was opposed to it personally, the latter is, to be blunt, insane.

Note that even the doom-mongering on Monday was saying that there *may* be 200 deaths a day from the virus (mostly the elderly and already ill). That's not great, but for a new and *fairly* nasty virus, that's not terribly unusual or unprecedented, given about 1500 people die every day anyway. The damage we're causing to our society, economy and health to try and cut that number is dramatically and dangerously disproportionate to that risk.

So we all have to ask ourselves - what are we even trying to achieve now, and if we can work that out, why?

We have collectively lost sight of what we’re trying to achieve. The post which mentioned “beat the virus” nailed it.

It seems to be the case Boris is gambling on a vaccine, but if that’s the case he should be straight with people, and as a policy it should be properly scrutinised in parliament. Hundreds of billions of pounds is a *lot* of money to be gambling with, especially as there are other severe consequences too - mental health and excess non Covid deaths for a start.
 
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