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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

We have a test centre for staff at work and the suggestion now is that all asymptomatic staff take a weekly test. I look after my 4 year old grandson once a week, he is at nursery the other four days. I’ve wondered how much of a risk I am to him, but as I have a mask and a screen separating me from the customers, I think he is more likely to bring infection back with him. Should I be tested the day before I look after him, or a few days later?
 
Covid-19: 'Act like you've got the virus', government urges
People in England are being told to act like they have got Covid as part of a government advertising campaign aimed at tackling the rise in infections. Boris Johnson said the public should "stay at home" and not get complacent.
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Maybe if the advice had suggested from the beginning that everyone should act like they had the virus instead of insisting that so many aspects of life should go on as normal we might not be where we are now.

It's a bit fucking rich for Johnson to say that people shouldn't get complacent given his government's actions over the past ten months...
 
Sue said:
People used to claim to buy it for the sport.. 🤷‍♀️
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Sports section is quite good actually, its had its ups and downs. I've always read it off and on tbh along with The Times, Guardian, Independent , The Mirror and occasionally the FT. I think you can read between the lines whatever the political leaning is, I avoid or at least I'm adverse to certain journalists whatever the paper they write for and the Telegraph does throw up some interesting stuff. The trouble is these days, especially with the covid restrictions is that online is the main source for news rather than print and aside from the Guardian. Mirror and bits of the Independent most stuff is beyond a firewall online hence the endless links to the bloody Guardian on here. Used to buy a paper to read in the pub or at home at the weekends in the UK but English papers are few and far between here and are about a fiver.
 
The39thStep said:
Sports section is quite good actually, its had its ups and downs. I've always read it off and on tbh along with The Times, Guardian, Independent , The Mirror and occasionally the FT. I think you can read between the lines whatever the political leaning is, I avoid or at least I'm adverse to certain journalists whatever the paper they write for and the Telegraph does throw up some interesting stuff. The trouble is these days, especially with the covid restrictions is that online is the main source for news rather than print and aside from the Guardian. Mirror and bits of the Independent most stuff is beyond a firewall online hence the endless links to the bloody Guardian on here. Used to buy a paper to read in the pub or at home at the weekends in the UK but English papers are few and far between here and are about a fiver.
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Not sure whether you can access it from Portugal but i have just signed up to a free two month trial with readly.com, a huge selection of newspapers & magazines to read online for £7.99 a month. It's not as good as paper in terms of holding your attention, but better than random internet searches. Lots of craft & special interest magazines on there too, which makes it good value. And you don't have to confine your reading of Hello magazine to the doctor's surgery...
 
cupid_stunt said:
Cheers. :thumbs:

Probably better to edit your post, and put the article in spoiler tags, so search engines don't see it, and the FT doesn't come after urban over copyright.
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Google still indexes hidden content. It has a lower weight, but it's there. It's not "hidden" from a search engine spider - you can quite plainly see it in the source.
 
SpookyFrank said:
Work. For businesses without a storefront, closing is entirely optional. I believe this and not individual non-compliance was the main reason locldown 1.0 took so long to have any effect, and why infections took a long time to fall.
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The effects of lockdown 1 were fast and very strong. If people think it was slow to have an effect then they have the wrong idea in mind about how quickly things can turn around even with strong measures. Indeed the turnaround was so soon after the original lockdown was called that some of the anti-lockdown idiots who refuse to learn anything in this pandemic were tempted to believe that the peak in infections was a co-incidence that was not down to lockdown. In fact it seems that one of the reasons the peak 'came early' relative to the first lockdown was that peoples behaviour changed massively a week before formal lockdown was implemented, so the gap between mass behavioural changes and the peak was more like 3 weeks than 2.

So in terms of time taken to turn things around, turning the hideous climb into a peak and then decline, I didnt have a problem with lockdown 1. There were still big issues, ie the lockdown should have happened much earlier, and the holes in it did mean that the inevitably long stage of getting infections right nown to a low level did take ages. Although that was in part down to the fact that hospital discharges in the buildup to the peak ignited a wave of care home infections, and outbreaks within hospitals were something that they only started getting a handle on and mopping up later (eg my local hospital had a big outbreak in June and after they stamped on it the figures here changed dramatically for a number of months before the autumn resurgence). Lockdown 1 was only a failure in terms of coming too late to prevent a huge chunk of the first wave, and then again much later where the holes in that lockdown left specific segments of society still exposed to the virus in the summer, quickly leading to local measures being deemed necessary in some places. These are bad failures, but they arent the same as the lockdown being too weak to get things moving in the right direction.

Things like google mobility data will enable me to make some comparisons between lockdown 1 and subsequent measures, including the current lockdown. From what I've seen of them so far, the November national measures did show up clearly in the data but it was nowhere near as strong as lockdown 1, which is exactly what we'd expect to see with schools open etc. The current lockdown is only just showing up in the data, but unlike the Christmas period, it looks like the amount of activity in workplace locations is now too high again, not close enough to levels seen in the original lockdown. And thats consistent with reports about too many kids still attending school right now. Also much like the buildup to lockdown 1, there was a large grocery/pharmacy spike which we'd expect to be unhelpful to the infection picture. I'm afraid I left the parks data off of this graph. These numbers are for the UK as a whole.

Screenshot 2021-01-08 at 21.27.46.png
 
elbows said:
The effects of lockdown 1 were fast and very strong. If people think it was slow to have an effect then they have the wrong idea in mind about how quickly things can turn around even with strong measures. Indeed the turnaround was so soon after the original lockdown was called that some of the anti-lockdown idiots who refuse to learn anything in this pandemic were tempted to believe that the peak in infections was a co-incidence that was not down to lockdown. In fact it seems that one of the reasons the peak 'came early' relative to the first lockdown was that peoples behaviour changed massively a week before formal lockdown was implemented, so the gap between mass behavioural changes and the peak was more like 3 weeks than 2.

So in terms of time taken to turn things around, turning the hideous climb into a peak and then decline, I didnt have a problem with lockdown 1. There were still big issues, ie the lockdown should have happened much earlier, and the holes in it did mean that the inevitably long stage of getting infections right nown to a low level did take ages. Although that was in part down to the fact that hospital discharges in the buildup to the peak ignited a wave of care home infections, and outbreaks within hospitals were something that they only started getting a handle on and mopping up later (eg my local hospital had a big outbreak in June and after they stamped on it the figures here changed dramatically for a number of months before the autumn resurgence). Lockdown 1 was only a failure in terms of coming too late to prevent a huge chunk of the first wave, and then again much later where the holes in that lockdown left specific segments of society still exposed to the virus in the summer, quickly leading to local measures being deemed necessary in some places. These are bad failures, but they arent the same as the lockdown being too weak to get things moving in the right direction.

Things like google mobility data will enable me to make some comparisons between lockdown 1 and subsequent measures, including the current lockdown. From what I've seen of them so far, the November national measures did show up clearly in the data but it was nowhere near as strong as lockdown 1, which is exactly what we'd expect to see with schools open etc. The current lockdown is only just showing up in the data, but unlike the Christmas period, it looks like the amount of activity in workplace locations is now too high again, not close enough to levels seen in the original lockdown. And thats consistent with reports about too many kids still attending school right now. Also much like the buildup to lockdown 1, there was a large grocery/pharmacy spike which we'd expect to be unhelpful to the infection picture. I'm afraid I left the parks data off of this graph.

View attachment 247914
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Driving has fallen further than November but nowhere near April levels:

Capture.JPG
 
Mr.Bishie said:
Welcome news. Not only for the exercise I do get when I go fishing, but for my mental health. So shove that face palm up your arse.
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If they want to make an exemption for it they should have put that into the legislation explicitly. Asserting that it's exercise makes it easy for anyone else to assert in court that their landscape painting or wrist exercises are suitable reasons to drive off into the countryside.
 
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elbows said:
Things like google mobility data will enable me to make some comparisons between lockdown 1 and subsequent measures, including the current lockdown. From what I've seen of them so far, the November national measures did show up clearly in the data but it was nowhere near as strong as lockdown 1, which is exactly what we'd expect to see with schools open etc. The current lockdown is only just showing up in the data, but unlike the Christmas period, it looks like the amount of activity in workplace locations is now too high again, not close enough to levels seen in the original lockdown.
Click to expand...
Similar periods of reduced activity and relative levels can also be seen in the Apple mobility trends data.
applemobilityuk.png
 
platinumsage said:
Driving has fallen further than November but nowhere near April levels:
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Cheers for the additional data.

As with the Google data I used, levels seen in March and April were really quite impressive. A similar thing in November would have been good to see, but of course such levels were neither aimed for nor achieved. And as for the current situation, still early in that period from a data point of view but things dont look that promising, and I wont be surprised if the government end up feeling the need to close more workplaces.
 
Sunray said:
This is the fault of Boris Johnson, the November lockdown should have stayed. Fuck Xmas
I want him to go to jail to set an example that there are consequences. This is a dereliction of his duty to protect the British people
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The November national measures were inappropriately weak and the government knew it. Apparently they are alarmed that swathes of the public have been treating the current lockdown the same as the November measures, weak, and are now scrambling around trying to strengthen things. A disaster entirely of their own making.
 
platinumsage said:
If they want to make an exemption for it they should have put that into the legislation explicitly. Asserting that it's exercise makes it easy for anyone else to assert in court that their landscape painting or wrist exercises are suitable reasons to drive off into the countryside.
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For what it's worth, they have said still stay within your local area, don't meet up etc. Letting people sit alone by a riverbank (or even with their kids) isn't a hill I'd (etc).
 
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