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

bloomberg.com

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

#391

Post by nojvek »

In Seattle. I was very impressed once the mask mandate was out how many people complied. Sure there were some people protesting “are you sheep?” but 99% complied.

Honestly Costco and Fred Meyers + others really Amped up the game. You can’t enter if you don’t have a mask. Fred Meyers were nice enough to give you a mask if you don’t have one for free. You’d have to really be a rebel not to wear a mask. There are quite a few rebels here and there but strict enforcement by supermarkets really worked.

If the police were enforcing this I bet a few African American folks would have been shot over not wearing masks. The cops here just go crazy mode for the smallest thing.

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

#392

Post by lordnacho »

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…

I'm in the home counties around London, and I can see something similar. I actually ran into a pair of covid guards from the council, the only time I've seen them, and I kid you not they had their noses over their masks.

The rules stopped being followed some time ago, and I'll tell you why.

We can't believe in the government anymore, and it's because there's been too many cases of one rule for the people, one for the rulers. Multiple government level staff have been caught breaking the rules. Cummings was maybe the most egregious case, a known positive driving hundreds of miles to his parents, who is then protected by the PM from sacking. On top of that, when he actually did get sacked it was due to a petty internal power struggle months later, with no mention of the breach. Then there was the scientist with the affair, the MP who took the train back to Scotland, and so on. Plus stories of cronyism in who was given contracts to service the covid needs.

I can see why people think the rules are a theatre. They obviously don't think the rules matter, or that it matters whether we get the required projects done by competent people.

We elected a talker to waffle his way through the Brexit negotiations. That would have worked, because those treaties are impenetrable to normal people; He can do a bit of clever rhetoric to talk up this or that point, and nobody is any wiser because they won't know what it's like to be a cheese import business with no voice in the media. Now the game is up, because you can't talk your way out of a global pandemic, it's too far from normal politics to have practiced stepping around.

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

#393

Post by mjbeswick »

tedivm wrote: post #295
spoonjim wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staff enforcement is much easier in the US since losing your job results in homelessness.

The US has a homelessness rate of 6.2%, while the UK has a homelessness rate of 7.7%.

That's actually nonsense for the UK, as the real figure is 280,000 which includes people in temporary accommodation, which is provided by the government.

In the UK if someone is on the street and needs a place to stay there are shelters in every town. Nationally there are about 4,000 people that sleep rough, although most of the people that do suffer from addiction or mental illness. Many choose not to go to shelters because you have to be sober to stay in them.

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

#394

Post by leesalminen »

renaudg wrote: post #389
hknapp wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. What are the stats (percentages) on those who get "Long Covid" by age group?

I don't have the age breakdown but serious/long Covid is about 15% of cases, which is potentially millions of people in most countries if we let the epidemic rip through. Symptoms include mental fog, loss of concentration, extreme fatigue, loss of smell.. This is why the idea of chasing herd immunity without a vaccine has always been misguided

You seem to be combining “serious” and “long” cases together. We already know that the vast majority of “serious” cases occur in the elderly/sickly, so your statistic of 15% is useless FUD.

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

#395

Post by grey-area »

robbiep wrote: post #161
grey-area wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So Australia (Melbourne at the time) and the UK had basically the same case reports per day in July. One place crushed it, the other didn’t. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/drericlevi/status/132282229786701... [1] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...

Firstly, the UK response has been terrible, Australia far better.

However there are several contributing factors and it certainly doesn’t come down to mask use as the primary one as mask discipline in the UK hasn’t been bad in my experience.

This is a seasonal disease (the main reason for the UK summer reprieve), and it’s now summer in Australia, and they have also been far better at quarantines and contact tracing and have used this period wisely to get the disease under control. All these factors matter in a response, and the UK has suffered from panic management and a lack of difficult measures at the right time and is now entering the peak season for this sort of virus so things will get worse for a month or two at least, even with a new lockdown.

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

#396

Post by grey-area »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #250
mmusc wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contract tracing wasn't very effective. What worked in Melbourne was that 8 months of house arrest for everyone living in the city... I'm all for managing the virus spread but if the policies are a piece of meat, in the UK the policies are uncooked in Melbourne they were burnt.

> What worked in Melbourne was that 8 months of house arrest for everyone living in the city... The .au epidemiologists I've heard on NPR have made it clear that what worked in Melbourne was everything they did, including a lockdown and including contact tracing.

Exactly, there is no one magic bullet. The changing seasons probably helped too.

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

#397

Post by MaulingMonkey »

morlockabove wrote: post #289
MaulingMonkey wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent amount of it is unintentional I suspect. Subconcious fiddling, poor feeling / awareness of slipping masks... a gentle reminder that "your mask has slipped a bit" can do wonders.

Some responses to that will be (in the spirit of) coughing in the speaker's face.

So far nobody's coughed in my face, in spirit or otherwise.

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

#398

Post by JimTheMan »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #388
JimTheMan wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK could have closed all these borders down. They just chose not too.

The UK could not close those borders down, we would starve.

... you can still unload freight. You limit the movement of people though.

People love to make excuses or put up obstructions to an idea, but solutions are almost always achievable with a little planning, resources and the will to make it happen.

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

#399

Post by shadowprofile77 »

Let's summarize some basic realities quickly to give a picture of why lockdown was largely a farce as anything but a short-term harm reduction measure. For those of you here (I assume a slight majority at least) who live in bubbles of white collar work conditions that can easily be done remotely from within highly developed countries with fairly developed social support infrastructure and the means to amp it up for extended periods of time: The vast majority of the rest of the world is not like your bubble. Despite massive improvements in human standards of living during the last several decades, the majority of the world population in the majority of the world's countries lives in such a way that their absolutely essential daily economic needs can only be serviced by daily close interaction with dozens or hundreds of other people in urban situations. For the developing world this is a nearly universal need and even for the developed world, huge parts of the population have to do the same thing and there's simply no way for them to avoid it. Covid will spread among them no matter what kind of extreme measures a small privileged subset of the population smugly pushes for, and from there it will by one means or another filter its way upwards even to those who can indeed isolate without major immediate economic problems. So, unless a small fraction of the world that can entirely work remotely is somehow capable of completely cutting itself away from contact with the rest of the world of people who emphatically can't do this same thing, the pandemic will run its contagious course regardless of the measures taken haphazardly in one jurisdiction or another. This applies at both the global macro scale and the local scale, and unless you want to advocate an absurdly unrealistic level of social atomization continuing indefinitely with complete disregard for very real, very serious economic consequences, it's something that simply won't happen.

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

#400

Post by da39a3ee »

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…

Why are religious gatherings exempt? That seems utterly irrational. Surely now of all times is a time for the government to say to religious people “sorry, but we can’t pretend to respect your fantasies right now”.
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