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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Monkeygrinder's Organ said:
I don't see how you can coordinate the 10% thing without controls on who turns up and when (which they're not going to get). Once you've got a crowd at the station of people looking to get to work you're fucked. You can limit the number of people getting on but that crowd is still somewhere and they're not able to social distance. There's no point limiting the actual travellers if you've got a massive crowd on the platform/behind the barriers/in front of the station gates.
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You go through somewhere like Oxford Circus on a normal rush hour Friday during normal times. LU have got some staff wiho can manage a crowd with a whistle - they can get there head round this -its different but they got the skills
 
gosub said:
You go through somewhere like Oxford Circus on a normal rush hour Friday during normal times. LU have got some staff wiho can manage a crowd with a whistle - they can get there head round this -its different but they got the skills
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At rush hour, Holborn station regularly has a scrum of people outside waiting to get in as they limit numbers through the gates to avoid overcrowding on platforms. Anything approaching that would be utterly absurd and unmanageable.

The only way to realistically keep numbers down to 10% of normal is to plan to only have 10% of normal people needing to travel. That means doing some work, crunching some numbers, putting provisions in place. It means the government working with people like tfl, who have lots of numbers to crunch, and companies and unions, to work out exactly who can safely go back to work, and who can't.

It's far from impossible. But it takes organisation, seeing that there's a need to do it, and well, just giving a shit.
 
maomao said:
So if this does kick off a second wave, or breathe new life into the first wave when would we see that in numbers? First few days of June?
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Yeah, but maybe a little later. At a pure guess, numbers on the tube, buses, in work increase this week onwards. New infections begin, which are then passed on to others and become testable (though non-emergency workers won't routinely get tested?). That has to get through to vulnerable people, older relatives and others before it starts to appear in new hospital admissions. Right through to increased deaths - all of which will take a few weeks. By which time the damage has been done.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
At rush hour, Holborn station regularly has a scrum of people outside waiting to get in as they limit numbers through the gates to avoid overcrowding on platforms. Anything approaching that would be utterly absurd and unmanageable.

The only way to realistically keep numbers down to 10% of normal is to plan to only have 10% of normal people needing to travel. That means doing some work, crunching some numbers, putting provisions in place. It means the government working with people like tfl, who have lots of numbers to crunch, and companies and unions, to work out exactly who can safely go back to work, and who can't.

It's far from impossible. But it takes organisation, seeing that there's a need to do it, and well, just giving a shit.
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Yup, and doing that sort of detailed work, suggests responsibility. How can you too many people went back to work if you mandate exactly who does? How can you blame the behaviour of the general public if you tell them exactly what to do and when?
 
gosub said:
You go through somewhere like Oxford Circus on a normal rush hour Friday during normal times. LU have got some staff wiho can manage a crowd with a whistle - they can get there head round this -its different but they got the skills
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It's not really a question of managing the crowd though - it's more the basic fact of it just being a crowd. If you've got a large number of people in a confined space they're going to be close together, that's not something you can manage away.

You could just tell everyone to go away I suppose but then the whole back to work thing is out the window.
 
Monkeygrinder's Organ said:
It's not really a question of managing the crowd though - it's more the basic fact of it just being a crowd. If you've got a large number of people in a confined space they're going to be close together, that's not something you can manage away.

You could just tell everyone to go away I suppose but then the whole back to work thing is out the window.
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If they can own that space with large numbers they can manage it now
 
gosub said:
If they can own that space with large numbers they can manage it now
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I don't doubt they can manage it very well if the right number of people turn up wanting to travel (preferably well under maximum most of the day, just touching maximum at peak times). Anything higher than that will be total chaos, regardless of what they do inside the station. What do all the people outside the station do?

My guess, fwiw, is that it may well not come to that because everyone else will do the necessary work to avoid it. I hope I'm not being too optimistic, but it's not like the government has been in control of any aspect of this.
 
Wilf said:
Yeah, but maybe a little later. At a pure guess, numbers on the tube, buses, in work increase this week onwards. New infections begin, which are then passed on to others and become testable (though non-emergency workers won't routinely get tested?). That has to get through to vulnerable people, older relatives and others before it starts to appear in new hospital admissions. Right through to increased deaths - all of which will take a few weeks. By which time the damage has been done.
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Half the point of the surveys (inluding test-based surveys) and the talk of sewage is to reduce the lag of R estimates. There will still be some lag, and I dont have any of the data on those fronts that they have so I cannot judge directly for myself, but their ability to have a closer-to-realtime picture should be quite a bit better than it was during the first months.

Other gaps in public knowledge of the outbreak bother me greatly too. For example local authorities were complaining that the 2nd tier (provided by companies etc) test results were not available to them so they couldnt tell how many people had tested positive locally recently.

And unlike some countries where we got to hear about specific outbreaks at specific workplaces (eg particular meat packing plants), it doesnt seem like the UK reports on such things often. We got to hear specific examples of deaths of certain kinds of workers in healthcare, social care, transport etc, and we get some general statistical analysis of those. But outbreaks amongst workers at specific companies?
 
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This post from brogdale (the jonson clip) keeps coming to mind, particularly as we tumble towards business as usual, in the manner of that downhill cheese rolling competition in Gloucestershire :

brogdale said:
Apols if posted elsewhere...but this clip of Johnson speaking just 73 days ago is quite instructive when attempting to understand the early, recent history of the government's response to Covid-19:

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bullshit batshit colonial attitude cunt, fuck off!
www.bbc.co.uk

Coronavirus in Wales: All the news from Monday - BBC News

Welsh authorities warn of confusion as people in England are allowed to drive somewhere to exercise.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
13:08
English 'can't get to their nearest coast' due to Welsh rules
Many people living in England cannot visit their nearest beach due to different coronavirus restrictions in Wales, a Conservative MP has said.
Shrewsbury and Atcham MP Daniel Kawczynski said he was fed up of Wales having different rules to the UK government and called for the abolition of the Welsh Parliament.
It follows Boris Johnson's announcement that people in England will be allowed to drive somewhere to take exercise.
"The current gap emerging over this crisis results in the Prime Minister saying to my constituents you can now go for a walk on the beach, but you are prohibited from going across the frontier to get to our nearest coast," he said.
"I am sorry but the time has come to reach out as Conservatives to large numbers of like minded citizens in Wales who like us believe in one system for both nations.
"We must work towards another referendum to scrap the Welsh Assembly and return to one political system for both nations - a political union between England and Wales."
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2hats said:
A daily figure for R is an estimate derived from modelling. Those models are fed with various proxies (eg measures of mobility from phone companies and the dominant phone handset ecosystem vendors, surveys, analysis of sewage, results from, mainly, antigen testing). There is no direct measurement of current R on a given day.

The widespread serological antibody testing is currently still in a preparatory phase. As best as I know, there have only been small studies in the UK thus far.
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So probably presented as between .5 and .99 because this was the most optimistic guestimate. I imagine it was .99 on Thursday and 1.01 this evening taking into account the congas and overcrowded trains.
 
gosub said:
If they can own that space with large numbers they can manage it now
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How? I mean I've never noticed these people - in my experience Oxford Circus is a very densely packed mass crowd at peak times, I've never spotted any of these masters of crowd handling. But however good they are there's a basic maths involved here, you can't keep people more than a certain distance apart in an enclosed space, and tube stations basically function as inverted funnels, pushing people into tighter spaces as you go. Over a certain number of people getting in and you're going to have close packed crowds somewhere in that system.
 
elbows said:
And unlike some countries where we got to hear about specific outbreaks at specific workplaces (eg particular meat packing plants), it doesnt seem like the UK reports on such things often. We got to hear specific examples of deaths of certain kinds of workers in healthcare, social care, transport etc, and we get some general statistical analysis of those. But outbreaks amongst workers at specific companies?
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Is that not the kind of thing that comes up in contact tracing though where they notice/identify clusters in certain places? (Not that that's something we're doing. :rolleyes:)
 
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