It's not a lockdown at all. It is a polite request. Perhaps a bored policeman telling you to move along, since, according to Priti Patel, shoplifting is down, so the Old Bill has time on its hands.

You're right, but I think systematic refusal to test people with obvious symptoms and excluding anyone with preexisting conditions from the statistics is a step further.

IMO that's quite likely, but these infections and deaths will be the fault of the victims for failing to be sufficiently alert, not the government's fault for failing to tackle the Coronavirus effectively in the first place, and for releasing the lockdown prematurely and too extensively.

This is all very true and speaks very clearly as to why it's a bad idea to erode trust in institutions and experts.

Of course, blind obedience to authority is equally bad, but the public should have the sense that their authorities, broadly speaking, can be trusted and have their best interests at heart. Then when they go on telly to say "this is serious, stay home" more people will go "okay. so this is serious and we'd better stay home".

Clear messaging also helps, rather than this "stay six feet away from each other, but I've been shaking hands with coronavirus patients. Don't travel anywhere, but I've got my missus coming to visit twice a week" malarkey, because that just makes people think "well, they're not taking it seriously and they know more about it than we do, so it must not be that serious".

Sorry but I think our actual UK wide lockdown once imposed was handled well by the population as a whole.

And the UK government did then go on to compound this by one) obviously inserting political bias into the scientific advice it got and two) kept "the science" secret for no reason bar the fact that they wanted to hide they were only taking certain aspects of "the science" on board. Secrecy has become a reflex with these lot.

I think we were "saved" from the worse mistakes this current government could have made because they caught the virus themselves, I think if they hadn't things would have been very differemnt.

Well something is fundamentally wrong with it because we're still getting tens of thousands of new cases and hundreds of deaths long after "lockdown" should have taken effect.

My own, highly jaundiced, view is that whilst a few high profile lockdown breaks (involving the lower classes - naturally) have made the news, a lot of middle-class breaches have been ignored. It's like the fiction that in WWII, everyone obeyed all the laws and pulled together when in fact crime was sky high and the black market thrived, driven by middle-class demand for contraband.

Looking at my friends, acquaintances and neighbours here in a village in one of the hardest hit areas of the UK, while there's macro-adherence to the rules of lockdown (working from home, not having large gatherings, not too many dinner parties) there's a lot of micro-breaking of the rules - two families going for a walk together, pairs of friends running or biking together, friends "popping round" to each others' houses and so on. The number of vehicles parked in the lanes (because the car parks are closed) also shows that people are driving to take exercise - heck my running buddy drives his car to go for a bike ride because he doesn't fancy riding up the 2km 8% slope back to his house.:mad: (and yes, we have had words about it)

Another effect of Coronavirus, the self-proclaimed protectors of the countryside are killing raptors with impunity:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52667502

It seems to me that the solution to any problem out here in the countryside is to exterminate something :mad:

Yes, exactly. Trust in institutions is important, that is why institutions must also continuously prove themselves to be worthy of trust.

UK has been ... less than optimal lately. Russians helped too. Their anti-institution campaign in the West should be regarded as an act of war.

McHrozni

You can think that yes, but after 6 weeks of lockdown you'd expect the spread to me minimal if not snuffed out, if the lockdown was effective. So the evidence shows you to be wrong.

You're still free to think whatever you want of course :) Some people believe in the invisible wizard in the sky that has to be begged to save us. You're no worse, at least.

McHrozni

So do I, the problem now is people are getting bored with it and the good weather is coming. Staying indoors is easy in the cold and rain.

That means it was not handled well by the population as a whole. That means it was handled poorly, but that wasn't a problem because the weather also cooperated and the poor cooperation and bad weather was sufficient to reduce the spread.

McHrozni

Shooting the protected birds is disgusting, but they also sometimes lay poison which is even worse as the birds may pick up the bait and drop it elsewhere. There's a lot of pheasant shooting around here, and we're smack in the middle of one of the largest Red Kite populations. I always keep an eye out for suspicious meat when walking the dogs. A few years back there was a rumour about local game keepers putting out poisoned meat, around the same time my dog found a pork rib in the park, fortunately I saw it as he headed toward it called him back and binned it, all the grass in the spot it was laying died back and didn't grow back for months.

Gamekeepers around here think they're a law unto themselves, being male, reasonably big, and superficially looking like one of their own (tatty wax cotton coat, battered boots and very obedient lurcher) they haven't tended to give me too many problems but quite a few of the female dog walkers around here have had some pretty unpleasant encounters both on public rights of way or when straying by mistake onto the wrong path.

Here in South East Wales, since the lockdown was called, the weather has been uncharacteristically warm and dry which is a bit of a double-edged sword.

The general morale has been higher because people can get out in their gardens, and out and about (typical weather would have had us in a dismal mood) but this also means that people feel like they're on holiday.

I think this erosion is something that's been happening since the 60s or 70s. But it's definitely been accelerating.

Oh definitely. Russians have been running their campaign for at least 15 years now. Gains are invisible at first but then they snowball.

To clarify, it's not just the Russian fault, through they're deliberately doing it precisely to undo democracy and rule of law abroad.

McHrozni

From teh information you have it is not possible to make that conclusion.

The spread did become minimal that is why R is less thatn 1....

No there was not anything fundamentally wrong with it, what we saw was exactly what we would expect given the lockdown we had when we did it. Other countries have had different lockdowns, some had to be incredibly severe when they were put into effect because their health services had already become overwhelmed - for example North Italy. One of the key goals of our lockdown was to stop the NHSs being overwhelmed and whilst we came close to that we did prevent that.

But we are now straying a long way from the politics into the science of whether we chose the right kind of lockdown so we should if we want to talk about the science behind the lockdown, the models used etc take it to the thread in the Science section.

With thousands of new cases daily, most of whom are not from known contacts? No.

It was reduced sufficiently to get R₀ to below one. Minimal spread is R₀ of 0.2 or so. Having that value below 1 is just the limit where you can say "measures are somewhat effective", where time begins to work for you and you'll get over the outbreak in due course.

Six weeks of an effective lockdown are enough to snuff the virus out almost completely and reduce new cases to a trickle. For a country the size of UK that means maybe 300 new cases a day, most of whom from known exposures.

McHrozni

Rubbish - take your ideas to the sciecne thread.

The UK government has reached a deal with TFL over the bail out. Part of the conditions are to re-introduce the congestion charge in London as from monday.

They are also increasing the charge to £15, that should encourage less people to use public transport.

Although to counteract this, they are scrapping free bus travel from Monday also.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-52677059

No. He is correct. Get R down to 0.99, and the virus will eventually die out, but will take months or years to do so. Get R down to, say, 0.2 or less, and then the virus will die out much quicker. This is simple mathematics.

An example to keep things simple (because the real-world contagious time is variable): We take the average contagious time as one week, then with R = 0.2, after ten weeks the level of infection will reduce by a factor of 0.2 to the power ten. This is a factor of about ten million, so if there were less than ten million people contagious at the start of the ten weeks then you'd expect zero remaining contagious people at the end.

Edited by Agatha:

Edited to remove breach of rule 12. Please note that outside FMF unless specified "as mod/admin", mods and admins post as ordinary members.

And increasing the days and the hours you have to pay the charge.

Joined up government at its best!

For a typical betacorona virus at an R near 1 immunity will expire more quickly than new infections create it. This will push R back above1 so you effectively have the same rate of infections indefinitely. In practice many of these cases will occur in sporadic outbreaks.

If you get R0 below 1 though lockdowns and social distancing, that will cause the number of cases to decrease, but of course as soon as you try to return to normal active cases will explode again. At R0 of 0.99 you could be looking at years of social distancing between “normal” periods a couple months long.

You will never get to zero this way with a virus that can infect animals then spread back to humans. This is why only a tiny number of viruses have actually been exterminated even with extensive vaccinations.

R number is back up to 1.

I don't even ******* care anymore. This virus could kill everyone in the country and the last fucknut to die would still say, "Go on Boris lad. Best PM we ever had."

So the R rate had actually gone up before lockdown was lifted, they don't even know what it is today! What a bunch of ******** they are. I don't trust their data at all.

The question in my mind is now changing from "is the government just really **** or are they deliberately killing people?" to "what is the reason they are deliberately killing people?"

Is it to create instability so multi-millionaires can short trade and make a mint?
Is it to reduce the state and public sector pensions bill?
Is it to create such bad public finances that selling the NHS is easier?

Is it just that they're doing what Vladimir Putin wants?
We haven't seen the Russia report have we?

I think Hanlon’s Razor may apply here,
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

Haven't you heard about Russia? It's a hoax.

Our to put it another way, R is an emergent property. It doesn't control the rate of infection, it is a measure of it. Getting R below 1 is what happens due to several factors, some of which we can control, and others that we can't.

Matt Hancock claims that a protective ring was put up around UK care homes.

https://www.ft.com/content/6afb06d6-...6-74f500f096d0

Scotland's care homes have had more deaths than Portugal. The UK's care homes had had more deaths than Belgium.

Car home deaths were only included after the 28th April. Excess deaths in care homes is over 23,000.

The UK government is dangerously deluded.

I used to work with JVT under a previous Government. What evidence do you have for this claim?

Matt Hancock said last night in regard to NHS pay going forward that nurses have already had a 'very significant pay rise'.

He didn't say how much or when this was though.

Hancock also claimed "Right from the start we've tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes. We set out our first advice in February, we've made sure care homes have the resources they need"

Eton College has announced it won't consider re-opening until September.

Got to protect our future leaders.

True. Not letting anyone get out to go to the hospital...

But how are the parents supposed to get back to work at construction sites and estate agents?

Welp, so much for the hopes that Johnson owing his life to the NHS might see him advocate for them with more than lip-service.

And they been raking in the overtime!