To think that whitty and vallance did not seem to agree with Boris today

[Frozenfan2019]

Interested to know if it's just me who thought their presentation and the way in which they answered questions today suggested that they were opposed to Johnson easing lockdown. He spent ten minutes saying how much progress we have made and how we are in a good position and then they seemed to basically contradict this completely and say that things are still bad, the numbers are still high, r is almost 1 already etc.

So aibu to think they would orefer it if lockdown continued?

how's that going to work in schools next week, then?

Have you read the guidelines? They include regimented loo trips and constant cleaning.

@StatisticalSense yes I agree. I think alot of people are already doing what was announced today.

I recall warnings that we shouldn't go to war with Iraq due to the very high economic damage.

Falklands war only lasted about 10 weeks, so maybe different calculus. COVID19 crisis is going to go on for a few years in total.

So it’s suddenly dawned on the government that we love our families and miss them, or are we just being thrown a sweetener to shut up about Cummings?

What could possibly go wrong...

We haven’t got this disease under control yet and Boris is lifting social restrictions to divert attention from the whole Dominic Cummings fiasco. He’s an absolute moron.

I didn’t listen today but this has happened a fair few times.

Johnson goes off the cuff and the scientists have to reel it in.

@pipnchops

The toilet issue is about people spreading it via surfaces (the virus lives on surfaces) not transmitting through poo particles.

We close the toilet lid as a rule here anyway but not due to Covid.

Snoozylou.... makes you wonder doesn’t it for the cynical among us. We will have to wait a few weeks and see what impact this has.

Jesus. Are people really still asking how we will fund this? I don’t recall anyone ever saying we”d have to stop the falkland or Iraq wars because how would we pay for it. the economy didn’t grind to a halt while the Falklands and Iraq wars were happening though.

And really, do people seriously need their hands holding through every single step? So someone didn’t say you can’t use the loo? WTF happened to common sense? Or do people really actually want to live in the nanny state?

Spain and Italy re-opened at more or less the same stage as we are, infection rates aren’t rising, and in fact there is now a lot of speculation that the virus is going to burn itself out.

We cannot stay in lockdown indefinitely. It has to be a balance. And the truth is that there has to come a point when there will still be some risk and we will have to learn to live with it, even the shielded.

And of course Patrick Valance And Chris Witty don’t want to get involved in the politics, and that journalist deliberately targeting that question at them needs sacking.

I recall warnings that we shouldn't go to war with Iraq due to the very high economic damage.

We shouldn’t have gone to war with Iraq period (but that’s a whole other thread).

Yes the economic damage would have been bad, wars don’t come cheap but we always did it whilst having a functioning economy so money was coming in. You can’t say well we afforded those wars as a justification for extending lockdown any further. We need to get the country up and running again.

There was definite tension when Boris suggested a BBQ

I think that lockdown is pretty much over and were it not for pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops being closed, it would have seemed like a normal day with people doing what they used to.

Vallance and Whitty were props to make BJ look more serious. If the DC story hadn't broken I suspect we would have seen them earlier this week and T&T would not have been launched

"The point is that economic damage actually costs a lot of lives and there comes a tipping point where more lives are lost from that than would be lost from covid." I think thats true and thats the line the gov is walking.

Because the gov doesn't have money - it borrows or raises through taxes so to pay this back it may have to cut pensions and benefits / freeze public sector pay rises / freeze or cut public spending. Do people really not see a problem with the long term cost to the economy?

Definitely a sweetener to shut up about Cummings.
But if it.hadnt been Cummings, something would have tipped the balance. Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart.
I dont think the scientists get this. The science is justbgoing to backfire, if it doesnt take into account human patterns of behaviour.

We haven’t got this disease under control yet and Boris is lifting social restrictions to divert attention from the whole Dominic Cummings fiasco. He’s an absolute moron. nope. There possibility of restrictions being lifted from June were announced in the briefing nearly three weeks ago.

are we just being thrown a sweetener to shut up about Cummings?

Yep. Otherwise why didn't he do it Sunday night like he did 3 weeks ago. He wants Cummings out of the headlines tomorrow.

The problem with vague and slightly random guidelines (6 in England 8 in Scotland for example) is that people see room for interpretation. For example I am friends with a group of 7 of us. We wont be arranging to meet up but leaving one out. We know it would be allowed in Scotland and we would be 2m apart anyway. We know we are "allowed" to go to the toilet in someone's house so does it really make a difference if it's raining and we sit on a chair inside? As long as it's sped down afterwards. The list of things that people will choose to interpret will go on and on. People always bend and stretch rules, when lockdown was in its original form it was black and white and if you chose to meet up with someone you were clearly breaking the rules. There was no grey area. Now there is and people will push that.

This is not about the economy this is all about deflecting attention from Dominic Cummings - I suspect that history will judge this as a huge factor in what I fear will be a lot more deaths to come (and hugely more than other countries that don't need to contend with an unelected advisor that seems to trump science/logic/sanity).

I suspect Whitty and Vallance feel their reputations might well be tarred with everything the government gets wrong. However, they are looking at how the virus spreads and the danger caused by it. The government has to look at the danger caused by the lockdown and the economy.

A group of 7 friends would not be permitted in Scotland unless they lived in only 2 households.

*Otherwise why didn't he do it Sunday night like he did 3 weeks ago. Because today was the legal review of the lockdown. The reason he did the last one on the Sunday was so that people didn’t rush out on VE Day and the bank holiday weekend.

And people criticised him for waiting until the Sunday and not announcing on the Thursday.

I did pick up when one of them said 'this isn't a rose garden'!
Thought that was a coded message

And people criticised him for waiting until the Sunday and not announcing on the Thursday

The criticism was related to the fact that he was telling people to go back to work the next day. Then it was the Wednesday which still meant there was this massive rush to publish guidelines.

I just would rather listen to the scientific experts.

I left Westminster just as Chris Whitty got that job - not connected! But have heard from people still there that he has ways of subtly getting his message across. They all seem very impressed with him and apparently he's strangely attractive as well to both sexes

Massive difference - we didn’t shut down the economy for three months during the the Falklands or Iraq wars. People still went to work, children went to school, dentists were open, hospital appointments went ahead, restaurants were open, people could still get married or buried etc etc. Jeez🙄

Exactly. People were still able to go to work and earn money to keep themselves. But you think that now they can’t, we should be worrying about how we can afford to make sure they can feed themselves and survive. If you going to a restaurant is worth a higher death toll, you’ve got a screwed up sense of priorities. We’ll manage to reduced the debt over a period of years, just as we have done before. Ask any child if they want fed now or higher taxes in their future I’m sure they’ll give you the right answer.

The economy was fucked and life badly affected in WW2. There was never a suggestion we let Hitler win because we had to get the economy moving.

We are borrowing to get through it. An absolute fuckload. The point is that economic damage actually costs a lot of lives and there comes a tipping point where more lives are lost from that than would be lost from covid.

Economic damage only causes problems when a government is forced to start worrying about carrying a deficit which actually isn’t as big a problem as an opposition would have you believe. Economic damage only causes problems when people start bitching about supporting those on low incomes or living in poverty and the government decides to cut their support further.

I guarantee those asking how we pay for it aren’t the ones who are struggling right now.

Spain and Italy re-opened at more or less the same stage as we are, infection rates aren’t rising, and in fact there is now a lot of speculation that the virus is going to burn itself out

They had far lower daily infection rates than we do now, similar death rates if you believe all countries calc them the same.

Why would a virus that has only infected a small % of the population "Burn itself out"?

The SAGE report says opening schools on 1/6 is too early. If we wait 2 more weeks, infection in children will halve! Vallance and Witty are on SAGe. I don’t get why they are allowing this!! I thought we were following the science??