I still can't believe how un-Tory our Tory government has been, and yet still they're The Worst of The Worst in the minds of those with strong opinions. I don't much like our political classes, but I really wouldn't want to be in their shoes this year.
"the most untory" is probably because they're trying to spend their way out of this; but that is actually completely in-line with criticisms levied at the tories: Spend nothing on prevention, and overspend when shit hits the fan.
Could this have been prevented? China was only able to act fast because of the authoritarianism (bolting people indoors) and the global supply chain is sat in their backyard, not necessarily because they're making the right investment upfront.
Yes, tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented.
South Korea has a population of a similar size to the UK (51 vs 65 million), and have had approximately 400 deaths due to Covid compared to 40,000 in the UK.
I know that it's really appealing to compare countries, but it seems to me that it's simply really difficult to do that in a constructive way, without accounting for all the differences between them. I would imagine (though I couldn't easily find statistics on this) that the UK has far more people flying in and out of, thus making it more susceptible. Conversely, S Korea has a far higher (average, and perhaps clusters are the real issue) population density. The economic and political setup will naturally have a big impact (e.g. federal vs. non, market economy vs. planned etc.) on a country's ability to react. And finally, the statistics are calculated differently, and so we're not comparing two of the same measures.
None of this is to say that I believe the UK has performed well.
Yes, this is very much what I think too - the UK is a 'nexus' country with saturated and dense global and continental links.
So clearly the 'solution' would have been to very early on close the borders and lock everyone down for two weeks. Done and dusted!
But can you imagine that EVER having come to pass pre-March?
Our populace has no contemporary history or understanding of the implications of a pandemic and would have reacted with furore. Perhaps in future people will be a little more open to such practise, but certainly not prior to now.
> But can you imagine that EVER having come to pass pre-March?
Yes I can easily imagine it. A strong and clueful government could have taken the necessary steps. But here we are, 6 months later and we still don't have an effective track and trace process, not to mention adequate testing.
I appreciate you taking the time to comment in these threads, especially as people who see that you're a tory person will probably disavow the things you say on the face of it.
That said, I hope you don't take it as a rebuttal for the sake of it if I disagree.
The "solution" that our government suggested was to do nothing, not just to not to lock down at all but to quite literally do nothing.
This could have been the right thing to do and indeed was based on a pandemic model that had been created before. But was widely criticised at the time because the pandemic model which was used in the model had a significantly lower unmitigated R value.
It's possible for some to conclude that "they did the best with the information that they had at the time" owing to the fact that typically we always operate with an uncertain future, and looking back on passed decisions can be done with the clarity and certainty that only living with consequences can grant: but that does not apply here. Boris and co. intentionally downplayed the pandemic, intentionally killed off PPE plans and intentionally prevented the roll out of testing where needed.
This is before we even _think_ about lock-downs.
Lock-downs are not a panacea and they do nothing to stop a pandemic, they merely slow it while we work on a vaccine or until the population is sufficiently immune (without overwhelming healthcare).
The key thing for the current government is, then: do not overwhelm healthcare.
Which is harder to do when your party has chronically underfunded it for over a decade.
I'm not a Tory. You're perhaps conflating me with the first responder who admitted as much. That said, I can't stand ANY of our political masters and think party politics is mostly dysfunctional and inefficient.
Do I think Labour or the LibDems would have done any better, given they'd likely end up relying on much the same scientific input? Nope.
I do think that the conservatives have done worse than the others would have, but that's not really supported with any evidence other than it couldn't have been handled much worse.
The real fact I'm trying to bring home is that the healthcare capacity is one of the most important things and it is one of those things that has been in atrophied for many years.
The current governments approach, while quite slow, miscommunicated and contradictory: would have worked better if we had a working and well funded healthcare system.
All of these are interesting points, but don't change the fact that yes, thousands of deaths could have been prevented.
The fact that the UK government didn't take the required actions quickly enough and made some disastrous errors (eg with respect to care homes) doesn't mean that these deaths were not preventable.
> And finally, the statistics are calculated differently, and so we're not comparing two of the same measures.
In mainland China authoritarianism played a part but people made a lot of efforts by themselves, not out of fear, like in Taiwan and Korea.
I think that's one of the main problems we're having in the UK. Too many people have zero civic sense and complain about their "freedoms being infringed" instead seeing the big picture that in an epidemic everyone must act together for the group at the cost of individual sacrifices.
But those are vastly different countries, there are far too many variables to unpack before making a conclusive decision.
Freedoms are being infringed, but I do understand the need to sacrifice. We're not being asked for a lot compared to previous generations.
What we do need is real leadership though and lack of leadership is causing people to check out of caring about the virus. People would care a lot more if they believed their government had a plan.
> That's the point, isn't it? To understand that individual freedoms, and individualism, are not absolute and can be reduced temporarily when necessary.
Yes and no.
An individual right/freedom is immutable. It's not something "granted" to us by government, and not something they should be able to take away.
I understand the need for emergency measures, but in my opinion the government should've gotten consent before continuing this for months on end. There is a balance to be had here.
It's not a sacrifice if it's not a choice.
We now know the government doesn't have an exit strategy, so we could be stuck in this state for many more months to come. This is espet alarming when you consider people are missing NHS appointments (e.g. cancer diagnosis) or the serious economic issues. Serious fallout is coming.
Yeah, but if you compare them to Italy (hardly a stereotypical example of good administration), it's a pretty stark contrast. Italians made their mistakes too (last month in Sardinia, for example), their government is not even monolithic in terms of parties, but after early March they've contained it much better than we did. We had almost a month of head-start, we didn't use it, and now we're not even like them - we are worse.
As I've been saying to everyone (including my Italian partner whose stated much the same opinion as you have) - I don't think anyone can point to any state and declare with any assurance "They got it right!" and I don't think we'll be able to until this time next year at least.
To herd or not to herd? To hide or not to hide? What risk is acceptable, and in what domains - social? Emotional? Economic? No one knows, but everyone still has opinions (myself included!).
As an actual Tory (not popular around here I'll admit) I'm amazed at how Boris' attempt to make everyone happy has resulted in across the board hate. It's the same mistake that Theresa May made, so surely you'd think he'd understand that.
Boris was handed a large majority and could have played to his side only. Choosing not to do this was an obvious error but, in a age where the media are setting the daily narrative, I can understand why.
Eh... Boris' job is literally to make decisions, some of which may be intensely unpopular or criticised by the media. Being spineless is not a vote winner.
I think part of the issue there is that he doesn't _have_ a side as such. He was elected by a historically bizarre coalition, driven by the Brexit issue.
No, you are correct and having a side, as such, was the wrong term. Swap 'his side' for people who were fed up of political posturing and just wanted to get things done. That thing was obviously Brexit, at the time, but I think it also applies to 'things' in general.
In other words, taking the Covid issue head-on and making decisions in spite of what the media reaction would be may be something that the same group of people could support?
What we have now is a PM and Govt being criticised from all 'sides'. A classic example of trying to please everyone and actually pleasing no one, if you like?
> In other words, taking the Covid issue head-on and making decisions in spite of what the media reaction would be may be something that the same group of people could support?
I don't think they would have, though, at all. The "get Brexit done" sentiment is mostly popular amongst people who discount the chance of Brexit having any significant impact on their lives (there's polling on this; the most pro-brexit people are also, oddly, the ones most likely to think that Brexit won't actually do anything much in terms of practical impact on their everyday lives). Whereas decisive action on covid would have been, in the short to medium term, far more disruptive than what has actually been done.
How is that odd? Isn't that to be expected? The argument against Brexit made by the Remain campaign consisted almost entirely of very bad things will happen, the sky will fall, mass unemployment etc. If you don't believe that it's natural to be more pro Brexit.
Actually that last sentence may not be obvious. On his blog, Dominic Cummings made a rather important point about the UK and EU that largely escaped notice: the EU is broadly unpopular with a clear majority of the British population. The idea that the EU sucks is widely accepted. The referendum was a (somewhat) close match only because a significant proportion of the people who don't like the EU and would have wanted to leave feared the terrible consequences they were promised.
People who genuinely support the EU as a project has never really got higher than about a third of the population:
This is why the EU/Remain strategy during the campaign was so unrelentingly negative. The message was consistently not the EU is great and we should stay because it makes sense, the message was the UK's nominal allies will inflict great punishment if it leaves. This was a rather cynical but understandable political calculation when you see the polls. Fear motivates. It nearly dominated and caused Remain to win.
The problem with the current government is they're failing at the basics. There were obvious things that could have been done but weren't that should have made everyone happy because they really aren't (party) political issues. Like mandating mask use back in February. Or allocating funds for PPE to companies that are actually capable of producing it. I heard a government minister on the radio the other day saying they hadn't anticipated the increase in demand for testing when schools went back. How did they not anticipate that!? Anybody with half a braincell could have told you that. They deserve all the hate they're getting for sheer incompetence.
Back in February the WHO's position was that it wasn't yet a pandemic and that masks were useless. Their advice was merely to protect healthcare workers and to protect those who were most vulnerable.
Expecting Boris to have mandated mask usage in February is bizarre, not a single country or health authority anywhere was even considering doing that back then and remember - all the scientific studies said that masks were of unclear or no value in stopping the spread of flu, one of the closest analogues. So that's some pretty serious Captain Hindsight behaviour going on here.
and, although the title is pretty fierce, it does seem to be well-argued and b/c today it was revealed that the author is someone who works for Fauci at CDC!
Not that I know of, no. But there sure are a lot of people on HN who get mad if you point that out. Look at my comment history to see the long and frankly tiresome battle against COVID hysteria dating back to March (when people were claiming Italian hospitals were already turning people away en-masse and ventilators were already exhausted, although it wasn't true!)
If you don't mind me asking, what attracts you to the Tory party? Everyone I know seems to despise them for all the cuts to social welfare and racist comments, so I'd be very interested to get some thoughts from outside the echo chamber.
I can answer at least something, though I'm not a Tory, so someone please correct me if I'm mischaracterising:
1) David Camerons right to own policy was very favourable among young adults who felt like they will never be able to own a home. I had a friend of mine tell me that he "selfishly" voted tory because of that policy.
I didn't have the heart to tell him where the money came from.
2) Tories are good at projecting a feeling of "control" and making their opponents seem a bit chaotic or not as clear. Their opponents do not help themselves here.
This is my own observation, I see often that tories will speak clearly with a single voice and paint labour as being "in chaos" or that labour is seriously divided on key issues.
3) People are generally afraid of immigration. Tories are on the anti-immigration side of things publicly (though, this is betrayed by their actual policies, because immigration brings a lot of wealth to the country.)
4) People don't like taxes, and see the cuts to public services as "eventually coming to them". This was told to me by my friends father who voted tory.
Pretty much the Brexit issue and how incompetent Labour have been lately.
When I was younger I definitely favoured Labour, but drifted towards Tory/Brexit party when Brexit happened. I don't particularly like giant power structures and want small government - Labour will never give me that. I also strongly identify with core conservative values, even if the Tories don't project them very well, I don't see an alternative.
Thanks for answering! I'd love to discuss your values in more detail but this really isn't the place to do that.
For now, I'd definitely ask you to consider if supporting the current party (which as you note is antithetical to some of your values) might damage the country or move it too far away from your ideals?
I generally feel let down by all the major political parties, so I've been attempting to vote for whoever will do the least harm but it's so hard to figure that out these days :/
The problem is there's very few electable parties. I'm a fan of the Brexit Party but I doubt they'd ever get a real platform to get in. My only other options are protest votes, so all incentives point to the Tories. Being part of the party (rather than an outsider) at least allows me to influence it. Hopefully Labour bounces back, but as long as they stay on their current course, they're generally unelectable for us northerners.
I suspect “not wanting to be in their shoes this year” is exactly why the level of competence is so low. The competent looked at the situation the UK was in even before Corona started competing with Brexit for public attention, and decided to let someone else to take the blame.
> I really wouldn't want to be in their shoes this year
I think it applies to any political party which is currently governing in all countries. this is very difficult situation and none of the options are pleasant.
They've been pretty timid about restrictions, I think. In Ireland, with similar numbers to the UK (10% lower) we've locked down Dublin again (no visitors from more than one household inside or outside, restaurants outside only, no pubs, must work from home unless impossible). And that's mild compared to some restrictions on the continent.
In particular, the UK government seems to have an obsession with getting people back to offices; as far as I know basically everywhere else in Europe has continued to at least suggest, if not mandate, working from home where possible.
I believe enforcing restrictions now would be near impossible without military involvement and this is highly unlikely. The original restrictions were, from what I witnessed, barely enforced after the first week anyhow.
Speaking anecdotally from my friend group of professional adults with kids on London, it really feels like the government has lost the cooperation of even the most law-abiding and willing-to-cooperate people at this point.
I mean they spent the last month giving the entire country a month-long 50%-off "Groupon" to every restaurant and telling us to go out more to prop up the economy. Then a couple of weeks later, they open schools without sufficient testing capacity and say it's our fault for a disease spreading because we aren't complying with the ever-shifting and often nonsensical rules.
I'm sure nearly everyone in London has had the experience of being required to wear a mask on a train and then walking 5 feet into a coffee shop where you can sit in an enclosed space smaller than a train car without a mask. Or you've seen two restaurants next door to each other where one has their staff wear masks and the other takes literally no precautions. Or you've been told you can't have another family of 4 over to your house to eat dinner but you can play full-contact rugby with them if you like.
Combine that with the fact that COVID rates have been so low for so long now that must of us don't have personal experience with COVID and of course people are losing their will to cooperate. It would be one thing if there was an exit strategy on the horizon, but without one clearly defined, I think most people are just starting to give up on the idea of stopping COVID if it requires them to indefinitely suspend living their life.
This is just my impression of how my friends are reacting - I'm not saying that the situation isn't serious.
In fairness, with the advice on social distancing, face masks, etc. being what it is, to go to a restaurant or coffee shop is lacking common sense.
I think this is an important issue: The government has enacted 'strange' guidance, and offered that £10 restaurants handout because it does not want to anger anyone. But one would have hoped that the public could see through that and focus on the key advice (face masks and don't get too close to anyone)... Alas not.
I did not "eat out to help out", I have not set foot in a pub or coffee shop since March, and I haven't had a professional hair cut yet this year. Why? But I think that the priority is distancing and avoiding crowds in enclosed spaces, not saving £10 on a curry.
It's exactly how my friends are reacting here in The Netherlands. The haphazard rules just don't seem to make much sense, everyone is tired of it, and nobody we/they know has died from COVID.
Just last Friday, our PM announced that we're clearly dealing with a 'second wave', and to fix that we will close bars at 00:00 in particular regions. Why? Because apparently people in bars will behave properly until 00:00 and after that they start shouting into each other's mouths.
I think to anyone with half a brain it's obvious that these measures don't really make sense, so contrary to the intention more and more people will just say fuck it and go back to doing what they did pre-pandemic.
And our PM will wait for a huge surge to implement more serious lock-downs, because at least /then/ he'll have a reason to do so that doesn't make people dislike him. Fucking politicians.
Is the healthcare system in UK anywhere close to capacity? Is there a site with details about people admitted to hospital, in intensive care and on respirators (due to covid) that shows this?
Not at the moment, no, it's fine. The concern is for a rise in cases again right as we head into winter and have the usual respiratory cases too.
I think the 'nightingale' sites are all but unused at the moment, so there's some buffer, but the point is 'hey stop ignoring guidance/laws - the trajectory is bad' rather than 'it's bad right now'.
Not a huge fan of journalists or the BBC but in this case what are they meant to report? Vallance saying "this is not a prediction" and then making a prediction just reinforces the impression that the UK's public health officials are trying to have their cake and eat it.
He said:
"If, and that's quite a big if, but if that continues unabated, and this grows, doubling every seven days... if that continued you would end up with something like 50,000 cases in the middle of October per day. Fifty-thousand cases per day would be expected to lead a month later, so the middle of November say, to 200-plus deaths per day. The challenge, therefore, is to make sure the doubling time does not stay at seven days. That requires speed, it requires action and it requires enough in order to be able to bring that down"
If that's not a prediction but rather a pure hypothetical then why is he saying it? And why is he then using what he just said to justify a call for "action"?
If it looks, walks and talks like a prediction then it's a prediction. The BBC are right to ignore his mealy-mouthed attempt to wriggle out of accountability by pretending it's not.
Freedom of association, movement and commerce should never have been surrendered so willingly. Any argument against lockdown is branded as conspiracy theory or antivaxx
I don't think people saying that lockdowns come at a terrible cost are being labelled conspiracy theorists. That isn't even in question. The problem is that for your argument being as effective as you like it to be, you have to downplay the risk of the virus without action, which usually means you have to accuse a big group of people (medical professionals, scientists, politicians) of lying.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadI still can't believe how un-Tory our Tory government has been, and yet still they're The Worst of The Worst in the minds of those with strong opinions. I don't much like our political classes, but I really wouldn't want to be in their shoes this year.
"the most untory" is probably because they're trying to spend their way out of this; but that is actually completely in-line with criticisms levied at the tories: Spend nothing on prevention, and overspend when shit hits the fan.
Yes, tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented.
South Korea has a population of a similar size to the UK (51 vs 65 million), and have had approximately 400 deaths due to Covid compared to 40,000 in the UK.
None of this is to say that I believe the UK has performed well.
So clearly the 'solution' would have been to very early on close the borders and lock everyone down for two weeks. Done and dusted!
But can you imagine that EVER having come to pass pre-March?
Our populace has no contemporary history or understanding of the implications of a pandemic and would have reacted with furore. Perhaps in future people will be a little more open to such practise, but certainly not prior to now.
Yes I can easily imagine it. A strong and clueful government could have taken the necessary steps. But here we are, 6 months later and we still don't have an effective track and trace process, not to mention adequate testing.
That said, I hope you don't take it as a rebuttal for the sake of it if I disagree.
The "solution" that our government suggested was to do nothing, not just to not to lock down at all but to quite literally do nothing.
This could have been the right thing to do and indeed was based on a pandemic model that had been created before. But was widely criticised at the time because the pandemic model which was used in the model had a significantly lower unmitigated R value.
It's possible for some to conclude that "they did the best with the information that they had at the time" owing to the fact that typically we always operate with an uncertain future, and looking back on passed decisions can be done with the clarity and certainty that only living with consequences can grant: but that does not apply here. Boris and co. intentionally downplayed the pandemic, intentionally killed off PPE plans and intentionally prevented the roll out of testing where needed.
This is before we even _think_ about lock-downs.
Lock-downs are not a panacea and they do nothing to stop a pandemic, they merely slow it while we work on a vaccine or until the population is sufficiently immune (without overwhelming healthcare).
The key thing for the current government is, then: do not overwhelm healthcare.
Which is harder to do when your party has chronically underfunded it for over a decade.
Do I think Labour or the LibDems would have done any better, given they'd likely end up relying on much the same scientific input? Nope.
I do think that the conservatives have done worse than the others would have, but that's not really supported with any evidence other than it couldn't have been handled much worse.
The real fact I'm trying to bring home is that the healthcare capacity is one of the most important things and it is one of those things that has been in atrophied for many years.
The current governments approach, while quite slow, miscommunicated and contradictory: would have worked better if we had a working and well funded healthcare system.
The fact that the UK government didn't take the required actions quickly enough and made some disastrous errors (eg with respect to care homes) doesn't mean that these deaths were not preventable.
> And finally, the statistics are calculated differently, and so we're not comparing two of the same measures.
How are excess deaths calculated differently?
In mainland China authoritarianism played a part but people made a lot of efforts by themselves, not out of fear, like in Taiwan and Korea.
I think that's one of the main problems we're having in the UK. Too many people have zero civic sense and complain about their "freedoms being infringed" instead seeing the big picture that in an epidemic everyone must act together for the group at the cost of individual sacrifices.
Freedoms are being infringed, but I do understand the need to sacrifice. We're not being asked for a lot compared to previous generations.
What we do need is real leadership though and lack of leadership is causing people to check out of caring about the virus. People would care a lot more if they believed their government had a plan.
> Freedoms are being infringed, but I do understand the need to sacrifice.
That's the point, isn't it? To understand that individual freedoms, and individualism, are not absolute and can be reduced temporarily when necessary.
Yes and no.
An individual right/freedom is immutable. It's not something "granted" to us by government, and not something they should be able to take away.
I understand the need for emergency measures, but in my opinion the government should've gotten consent before continuing this for months on end. There is a balance to be had here.
It's not a sacrifice if it's not a choice.
We now know the government doesn't have an exit strategy, so we could be stuck in this state for many more months to come. This is espet alarming when you consider people are missing NHS appointments (e.g. cancer diagnosis) or the serious economic issues. Serious fallout is coming.
To herd or not to herd? To hide or not to hide? What risk is acceptable, and in what domains - social? Emotional? Economic? No one knows, but everyone still has opinions (myself included!).
We're not at the end of this.
In other words, taking the Covid issue head-on and making decisions in spite of what the media reaction would be may be something that the same group of people could support?
What we have now is a PM and Govt being criticised from all 'sides'. A classic example of trying to please everyone and actually pleasing no one, if you like?
I don't think they would have, though, at all. The "get Brexit done" sentiment is mostly popular amongst people who discount the chance of Brexit having any significant impact on their lives (there's polling on this; the most pro-brexit people are also, oddly, the ones most likely to think that Brexit won't actually do anything much in terms of practical impact on their everyday lives). Whereas decisive action on covid would have been, in the short to medium term, far more disruptive than what has actually been done.
Actually that last sentence may not be obvious. On his blog, Dominic Cummings made a rather important point about the UK and EU that largely escaped notice: the EU is broadly unpopular with a clear majority of the British population. The idea that the EU sucks is widely accepted. The referendum was a (somewhat) close match only because a significant proportion of the people who don't like the EU and would have wanted to leave feared the terrible consequences they were promised.
People who genuinely support the EU as a project has never really got higher than about a third of the population:
https://dominiccummings.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/screensh...
This is why the EU/Remain strategy during the campaign was so unrelentingly negative. The message was consistently not the EU is great and we should stay because it makes sense, the message was the UK's nominal allies will inflict great punishment if it leaves. This was a rather cynical but understandable political calculation when you see the polls. Fear motivates. It nearly dominated and caused Remain to win.
Expecting Boris to have mandated mask usage in February is bizarre, not a single country or health authority anywhere was even considering doing that back then and remember - all the scientific studies said that masks were of unclear or no value in stopping the spread of flu, one of the closest analogues. So that's some pretty serious Captain Hindsight behaviour going on here.
https://archive.is/xfHiL#selection-407.27-407.105
and, although the title is pretty fierce, it does seem to be well-argued and b/c today it was revealed that the author is someone who works for Fauci at CDC!
Great experience! Thank you for providing level headed and well articulated responses to the widely spread mass hysteria.
I also learned a lot, special thanks for pointing Thomas Howell's books. Reading now the 'A Conflict of Visions'.
1) David Camerons right to own policy was very favourable among young adults who felt like they will never be able to own a home. I had a friend of mine tell me that he "selfishly" voted tory because of that policy.
I didn't have the heart to tell him where the money came from.
2) Tories are good at projecting a feeling of "control" and making their opponents seem a bit chaotic or not as clear. Their opponents do not help themselves here.
This is my own observation, I see often that tories will speak clearly with a single voice and paint labour as being "in chaos" or that labour is seriously divided on key issues.
3) People are generally afraid of immigration. Tories are on the anti-immigration side of things publicly (though, this is betrayed by their actual policies, because immigration brings a lot of wealth to the country.)
4) People don't like taxes, and see the cuts to public services as "eventually coming to them". This was told to me by my friends father who voted tory.
When I was younger I definitely favoured Labour, but drifted towards Tory/Brexit party when Brexit happened. I don't particularly like giant power structures and want small government - Labour will never give me that. I also strongly identify with core conservative values, even if the Tories don't project them very well, I don't see an alternative.
Sibling comment is fairly on point.
TL;DR: "The least worst" party (imo).
- Pro free speech (or as The Guardian like to describe me, "free speech extremist")
- Equality of opportunity (but not "positive" discrimination), NHS and safety nets fit here
- Proud of our country and history, and acknowledging the bad parts without trying to destroy them
- Capitalism/free markets over intense regulation
- Pro small business and anti corporatism
- Self responsibility
So definitely not the current Tory party, but more ideologically aligned with me than any other.
For now, I'd definitely ask you to consider if supporting the current party (which as you note is antithetical to some of your values) might damage the country or move it too far away from your ideals?
I generally feel let down by all the major political parties, so I've been attempting to vote for whoever will do the least harm but it's so hard to figure that out these days :/
I think it applies to any political party which is currently governing in all countries. this is very difficult situation and none of the options are pleasant.
In particular, the UK government seems to have an obsession with getting people back to offices; as far as I know basically everywhere else in Europe has continued to at least suggest, if not mandate, working from home where possible.
I mean they spent the last month giving the entire country a month-long 50%-off "Groupon" to every restaurant and telling us to go out more to prop up the economy. Then a couple of weeks later, they open schools without sufficient testing capacity and say it's our fault for a disease spreading because we aren't complying with the ever-shifting and often nonsensical rules.
I'm sure nearly everyone in London has had the experience of being required to wear a mask on a train and then walking 5 feet into a coffee shop where you can sit in an enclosed space smaller than a train car without a mask. Or you've seen two restaurants next door to each other where one has their staff wear masks and the other takes literally no precautions. Or you've been told you can't have another family of 4 over to your house to eat dinner but you can play full-contact rugby with them if you like.
Combine that with the fact that COVID rates have been so low for so long now that must of us don't have personal experience with COVID and of course people are losing their will to cooperate. It would be one thing if there was an exit strategy on the horizon, but without one clearly defined, I think most people are just starting to give up on the idea of stopping COVID if it requires them to indefinitely suspend living their life.
This is just my impression of how my friends are reacting - I'm not saying that the situation isn't serious.
I think this is an important issue: The government has enacted 'strange' guidance, and offered that £10 restaurants handout because it does not want to anger anyone. But one would have hoped that the public could see through that and focus on the key advice (face masks and don't get too close to anyone)... Alas not.
I did not "eat out to help out", I have not set foot in a pub or coffee shop since March, and I haven't had a professional hair cut yet this year. Why? But I think that the priority is distancing and avoiding crowds in enclosed spaces, not saving £10 on a curry.
Just last Friday, our PM announced that we're clearly dealing with a 'second wave', and to fix that we will close bars at 00:00 in particular regions. Why? Because apparently people in bars will behave properly until 00:00 and after that they start shouting into each other's mouths.
I think to anyone with half a brain it's obvious that these measures don't really make sense, so contrary to the intention more and more people will just say fuck it and go back to doing what they did pre-pandemic.
And our PM will wait for a huge surge to implement more serious lock-downs, because at least /then/ he'll have a reason to do so that doesn't make people dislike him. Fucking politicians.
Beds data is here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/healthcare
I think the 'nightingale' sites are all but unused at the moment, so there's some buffer, but the point is 'hey stop ignoring guidance/laws - the trajectory is bad' rather than 'it's bad right now'.
He said:
"If, and that's quite a big if, but if that continues unabated, and this grows, doubling every seven days... if that continued you would end up with something like 50,000 cases in the middle of October per day. Fifty-thousand cases per day would be expected to lead a month later, so the middle of November say, to 200-plus deaths per day. The challenge, therefore, is to make sure the doubling time does not stay at seven days. That requires speed, it requires action and it requires enough in order to be able to bring that down"
If that's not a prediction but rather a pure hypothetical then why is he saying it? And why is he then using what he just said to justify a call for "action"?
If it looks, walks and talks like a prediction then it's a prediction. The BBC are right to ignore his mealy-mouthed attempt to wriggle out of accountability by pretending it's not.