please empty your brain below

If you are Dominic Cummings none of this applies to you
Columns 1 and 2 refer to "Guidance", defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as "help and advice about how to do something or about how to deal with problems ...".
I may therefore be foolish to act as in column 3 but it would appear that I would not be breaking any laws.
Column 1 includes "It is a criminal offence to..."
Being a bit pedantic, in the second column, the following continue to not apply to people in your social bubble:
"You should continue to maintain social distancing with anyone you do not live with when doing so" and "You should keep two metres away from people as a precaution or one metre when you can mitigate the risk by taking other precautions".

Regards
I'd rather assumed those heading for the coast were nearly all going by car as there's nothing in the guidance to say they shouldn't, unlike the public transport approach with the addition of mask-wearing making it quite unpleasant and likely to discourage non-essential travel. I've not seen much evidence of large numbers travelling by train.
Normal people in normal houses/flats would struggle to keep social distancing between two 'household groups' in their properties even if they removed all of the furniture first, I don't see them wearing masks either, they'll be indoors (especially if it rains) laughing and joking, filling the air with droplets, touching everything.

Only the grumpy anti-social people will be left alive!
Is anyone taking any notice of these rules any more?

dg writes: Yes. Stupid question.
Andrew S: see here.
In early days your PM seemed to be in favour of herd immunity. It seems like that is what is now unofficially approved. Lots of 'you should' and not rules. What is happening in your country is not good.
Andrew, you're right that herd immunity was the official strategy at the outset, as promoted by the government's Chief Scientific Officer, a strategy that was then quietly put to one side because - I suspect - it was deemed politically unacceptable to espouse it.

In the absence of a vaccine, however, there isn't really any other way of fighting the virus. The UK does now seem to be approaching herd immunity levels of infection; that certainly seems to the case in London where the fatality rate is near zero. It may be that other countries, so far relatively unscathed, will continue to get localised outbreaks until they too achieve herd immunity, or of course until a vaccine is available.

dg writes: London is nowhere near herd immunity, nor the UK.
A helpful reply from Betterbee thanks. Having been no more than 10 miles from home since March and only seeing empty buses and trains passing by here in west London, I'd got the impression that outside the peaks virtually no-one was travelling.
DG, you're right that, on government figures, we are nowhere near herd immunity infection rates. How else though to explain the really low levels of infection and fatality that now apply in London? If it's not herd immunity, it's something that looks very like it, and which produces exactly the same outcome.

dg writes: It's not herd immunity.
Advice, Guidelines & Guidance are not enforceable in law. You can choose to follow it or ignore it of you want to. Only things specifically put into law are enforceable.
I wish the guidance would include links to the relevant statutory instrument. Much of it is law.

(Criticism of the Government’s webpages, not your post DG)
"In the absence of a vaccine, however, there isn't really any other way of fighting the virus" - the horse has bolted, but compare the UK covid death rate of 642 per million with New Zealand's, 4 per million (and no community transmission, nor excess mortality).

Sure, scale is an issue, but so are government competence, communication, decisiveness and trustworthiness.

In the 21 May 2020 issue of the London Review of Books, Rupert Beale from the Crick Institute writes "Humanity has never developed 'herd immunity' to any coronavirus, and it is unlikely that Sars-CoV-2 infection will be any different".
You need to get out more! (Obviously)
The more this virus goes on, the less certain I am about any aspect of it. There are baffling inconsistencies in the performance of different countries (eg Portugal/Spain, Puerto Rico/Haiti) without any obvious explanation.

As you say, New Zealand has had a fantastic record, so far. But what will happen when they re-open their borders? They have a population with close to zero exposure to the virus, and they will be as vulnerable to it now as they were at the outset.

The UK looks to have done extremely badly but we have - by accident or design - allowed the virus to circulate through the population. It is now down to pretty low levels in the capital; why is that? I'm happy to be told that it's not because of herd immunity

dg writes: It's not because of herd immunity.

but what is the reason? [By observation, it's certainly not due to social distancing.]










TridentScan | Privacy Policy