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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

The protests are incredible and for what it's worth I'm totally supportive, but I'm terribly afraid in the UK as well as the US and elsewhere they've been a brilliant and unexpected opportunity for the virus to have another crack.

Anthony Joshua on Friday, on his way to speak at a protest:

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Protests have been outdoors and the greatest transmission risk is indoors in places without ventilation.

Much more risk in indoor places like care homes(which are still seeing spread in ) and public transport
Sure, but Cheltenham was a flashpoint for lots of new infections and there are so many protestors without face coverings. And they all had to get there somehow.
 
I would try not to worry too much. Its outdoors and the protests start with distancing and masks. Infection rate in london for instance is thought to be 0.5%. The numbers involved in the less distanced bits of the protest will be smaller. Hopefully anyone who feels ill will stay home.... so if you have 1000 protester there would be a maximum of 5 people but probably fewer. Then they are hopefully mostly wearing mouth covers most of the time.

Of course the police dont socially distance from themselves or protesters and they kettle protesters and they are allegedly essential workers so been at higher risk throughout lockdown and may feel pressure to work even if they dont feel 100%. So that could increase risk.

Even then there are probably far fewer protesters than people who have returned to work in enclosed spaces travelling there in enclosed spaces the last couple of weeks.

I mean none if it is great but if we actually had a way to track transmission I'm not convinced the protesters would be a significant contributor

Just my opinion obviously.
 
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What a front page
Good to see theres nothing happening in the world

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The paper of record lol

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Why don't the police wear masks? I am still shocked by what I'm seeing in the UK.

I'm staying in a place where several bus routes go past. Buses are almost empty but it's really noticable that of the few passengers, almost all are black or asian. Some already wearing masks.
I prefer my cops to be easily identifiable
 
I read an article by a racing journo who covered Cheltenham a while back. The atmosphere sounded completely mad.
 
Trying not to worry too much about something as important as protest that is happening regardless isn't quite the same as saying yay let's have loads of festivals! It's totally fine!


weren't lots of people including many on the liberal types on the demos comdemning the 5g protests(which were of course rubbish) for not S/D.
 
There's also no mass group hugs etc as there were in the 5g protests as far as I can tell. There's definitely a risk but there are some mitigating factors about the BLM protests imo, also the BLM protests aren't targeting essential communications infrastructure that could literally kill ppl if damaged
 
Some good news

No new coronavirus deaths have been reported in Scotland for the first time since lockdown began, new figures released on Sunday show.

A total of 2,415 patients have died in Scotland after testing positive for coronavirus, no change on Saturday’s figure – the first time the death total has remained the same since 20 March. No new deaths with coronavirus were reported in Northern Ireland either, leaving the total recorded by the Department of Health – a tally primarily including hospital deaths – at 537.


This comes as the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said 40,542 people had died in hospitals, care homes and the wider community after testing positive for coronavirus in the UK as of 5pm on Saturday, up by 77 from 40,465 the day before.

 
Interview with Sunetra Gupta, the author of the dissenting Oxford paper that gave a different model from that of Imperial at the start of lockdown predicting that the virus had already spread far and wide.



She makes many points. Her main one is that she still thinks that the data support her original model despite the low antibody levels found in testing. Alternative explanations for how people fought it off are a little bit hand-wavey as she doesn't give precise mechanisms, but essentially they involve people either fighting it off with antibodies to other coronaviruses or being resistant to infection due to some genetic or other factor. Something that does seem to fit, though, is the similarity of the patterns of pandemics across countries and regions. London, for example, is plummetting through the charts in the UK atm having had the biggest outbreak, and just lockdown alone doesn't fully explain that. Some significant build up of population resistance does.

She questions the obsession with Rnumber, thinking it's essentially unknowable, and advocates purely looking at deaths to see how things are going. Gupta stresses the harm of lockdown, in particular to the poor. I do think this is something that's been rather neglected, and I agree with her that the middle classes have largely been able to coast the lockdown out in a way that others can't.

She doesn't name The Spectator, but I'm sure they are high on the list when she says that she is annoyed by the way libertarian anti-lockdown types have latched onto her ideas, and seeks to distance herself from them. The interviewer rather feeds her this point, but she does say that lockdown itself may have cost the lives of people in care homes as the hospitals were emptied to make way for the expected surge. However, she also makes the point that 40 years of underfunding the health service were a major factor in causing that. Gupta is coming from a pretty good place politically.

As to how things might play out from now. Gupta advocates lifting lockdown quickly to mitigate the ongoing harm it is causing. Best-case scenario, she's right and the first wave is over, and it may not return for one, two, or even 30 years. She says that lockdown policy has been made on the premise that the worst-case scenario, as outlined by Ferguson, was right. It's clear that she still thinks this is wrong to some degree, probably a very high degree.
 
I just find the protests really worrying. I'm sympathetic to the cause, but it's just a stupid idea to be in big groups. Social distancing and masks are useful for normal life, but in big crowds it's just not going to work.
The whole thing about this virus is that it is slow acting and even if you have it you won't know for a while and you can go around giving it to other people. I've been reading about it on here, and it seems like an unpopular opinion, but I think that it's stupid and selfish to go out to something like this because it's not about catching the virus so much as spreading it.
All of my friends on my facebook and insta are posting in support and I just can't get behind it when this virus is still such a problem.
 
I just find the protests really worrying. I'm sympathetic to the cause, but it's just a stupid idea to be in big groups. Social distancing and masks are useful for normal life, but in big crowds it's just not going to work.
The whole thing about this virus is that it is slow acting and even if you have it you won't know for a while and you can go around giving it to other people. I've been reading about it on here, and it seems like an unpopular opinion, but I think that it's stupid and selfish to go out to something like this because it's not about catching the virus so much as spreading it.
All of my friends on my facebook and insta are posting in support and I just can't get behind it when this virus is still such a problem.

Fuck off Dave.
 
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