Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 448 posts

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#151

Post by bsdz »

LatteLazy wrote: post #110
rweir wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50% where? my counter-anecdote is I've taken to counting everyone on the carriage I'm on (between zone 2 and 1), and it's never more than 2-3 people without a mask, something like 90-95% compliance (seems down from a few months ago, though). in supermarkets it seems higher than that, to the extent I was quite weirded out to see a single person not wearing a mask last…

TFL Rail, the Eastern half, Romford, Chadwell Heath etc. To be fair, it got better on the central line. This was mid day not commuter rush. I do think East London is pretty poor at compliance culturally...

This is my observation too. Compliance varies across different parts of London. I was quite surprised to be the only person wearing a mask in a busy Tesco Local in East London several weeks after they were first mandated. In comparison, in far South East London it's unusual to see someone without a mask shopping.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#152

Post by gnusty_gnurc »

robocat wrote: post #140
gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia is an island with a population almost half California. China welds people in their houses and forcibly enters homes and drags family to some location. I have no desire to emulate them.

I’m tired of hearing excuses. 20% of New Zealand export income[1] came from tourism, yet we closed the doors on February 1st, cancelling tourists while the season was still high. If you want to get rid of the virus, you can, but you have to suck up the costs: shut down your borders and do whatever it takes. Close down internal travel: domestic flights were virtually shutdown in NZ; Ozzie’s had other overland travel r…

> but you have to suck up the costs

In other words immiserate anyone who’s not a comfortable white-collar person that can hole up in their home, Zoom to work, and dispatch immigrants to deliver food

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#153

Post by mejutoco »

user-the-name wrote: post #58
friendlybus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parroting Christopher Hitchens: what is presented without proof can be dismissed without proof Mutations that have a real impact on the RNA of the virus are incredibly rare. Most random mutations and errors replicating don't produce any meaningful change in the virus and you have to get very unlucky for a deadly mutation to happen. We should stick to scientific rationalism even if it has limits. There has been too mu…

> Parroting Christopher Hitchens: what is presented without proof can be dismissed without proof This is nonsense that assumes an antagonistic purpose to a discussion, and not actually an attempt to reach a higher understanding.

Isn‘t this the burden of proof under a different name? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#154

Post by randomsearch »

k0stas wrote: post #30
pmoriarty wrote: post #9

As has been pointed out in an earlier article about the "new strain"[1]: "Let's not be hysterical. It doesn't mean it's more transmissible or more infectious or dangerous." That there are new strains of COVID-19 has been covered over, and over, and over, and over again on the This Week in Virology podcast[2] (which usually has 4 to 6 virologists on it every week discussing COVID-19 news), and they've always had the s…

> but there is no evidence that these mutations Parroting NN Taleb: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Haven't we learned from coronavirus that we need to use the precautionary principle in the face of new information that is not fully understood. I don't know where you are from, but I locally heard a string of "there is no evidence of" starting in about January of 2019. There was no evidence that the vi…

Just a note on the precautionary principle: you can only apply it if you’re sure the action you’re taking does not cause harm. An example where this could be the case is enforced community mask wearing - it could introduce new vectors for transmission, for example.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#155

Post by vmception »

leg100 wrote: post #135
vmception wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That requires a lot of assumptions Authoritative: I don't consider less-inclusive political systems worse. They have best, average and worse cases, where the problem is that they get worst case many times over. A benevolent dictatorship is capable of getting the best case results, the predictable threat is that their replacement will not be capable of stewarding resources the same way. Whereas more inclusive politica…

> I don't consider collectivist to be a pejorative term and don't know of any context where it is. You picked a synonym, selfless. Oh I don't know, socialism scares republican voters shitless, I wouldn't be surprised if collectivism did too.

Okay.

These words are not inherently insults regardless of how allergic other people are to adjectives.

All good though.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#156

Post by randomsearch »

mhh__ wrote: post #118
nicoburns wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the UK is secular. Christmas has cultural significance (and everyone gets time off work), not just religious.

"We don't do God", as the saying goes, is a major difference between (say) the UK and the US.

Forgotten that quote, which was from the Blair government for those who don’t recall it.

As other poster pointed out, monarchy and CoE would disagree though.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#157

Post by makomk »

pjc50 wrote: post #117
mhh__ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also New Zealand? Our (UK) response has been a bit of a clusterfuck so far, we're not a good example to judge by.

Indeed. We could have chosen to be an island, but that would have meant quarantining business travel.

It'd also have meant severing food supply chains (and probably also medical supply chains and a bunch of others). The UK relies on trucks coming across from the continent and continuing on to destinations throughout the country with their original drivers. Ending that would make Brexit look like a walk in the park by comparison. Also, you've got to remember that the time period during which the UK would've had to do this for it to be effective was one where the WHO and all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive, xenophobic and made things worse, something Trump would do, and when Italy still incorrectly believed they had zero cases.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#158

Post by LatteLazy »

grey-area wrote: post #119
LatteLazy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, Melbourne is A-Okay. They'd have been that way much earlier if it wasn't for one major super spreader event.

Aggressive contact tracing works when the disease is at low levels.

If only the UK had the same level of government as Melbourne and Singapore and Japan and South Korea and New Zealand and all the other places that did that...

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#159

Post by asdff »

dehrmann wrote: post #93
LatteLazy wrote: post #59

I live in London. The core issue here is that the government hasn't really taken any action. There are "rules" but they are full of loopholes and totally unenforced. 2 cases in particular stand out to me: Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to w…

Masks might slow it, but they're everywhere in the Bay Area, and cases are rising faster than ever, and we're setting new records for new cases, so "just wear a mask in public" isn't enough.

Masks in public can only help so much when the major source of the spike in cases is individuals gathering in private settings without masks.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#160

Post by mprovost »

lend000 wrote: post #112
pjc50 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia?

And islands. Australia may be a continent, but its low population density and lack of roads connecting it to more populous regions is certainly a contributing factor. All of the countries doing best are either authoritarian or effectively political islands (Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, China).

Great Britain is an island...
Post reply on HN