How is this still spreading?

[Dee96]

This may sound like a rather dumb question but the whole point of lockdown was to decrease the rate of this spread. I understand for a while into the lockdown we was going to see the results of those who caught it beforehand starting to display symptons but were all 3 weeks into this now and it doesnt seem to be slowing down. Yes I know people still need to go the shops ect but given the measures they are now taking and how they are controlling how many people enter the shops I would think it's actually safer and less likely a risk to shop now rather than before when everyone was panic buying. So how come death rates and cases dont seem to be slowing, especially given theres a huge amount of undetected cases as well

Hardly surprising. Have you not noticed how many people continue walking their dogs off their leads?

The phrase "key worker'' is only relevant to still Having access to childcare.

The government advice is to stay at home unless you have to work and cant work from home.
Plenty of people working who aren't "key workers"

The government advice is to stay at home unless you have to work and cant work from home
And that is most people. Most people have to work and can’t work from home.

Because it’s everywhere, and will continue to spread unless the entire population of the world all stay at home for a month or more at exactly the same tine. Clearly not going to happen.

The current soft lockdown is only to slow the curve. How many cases do you think there would have been by now if life had continued as normal.

Reality is most of us have either had it in a mild form or will get it in the next couple of years as it spreads and people either die or build immunity. It’s not going away.

Brutal but true unfortunately

The death rate tells us nothing its the infection rate which is important

We have no idea what the infection rate is

I try not to watch the news too much but the figures aren’t going away & the UK are possibly going to be the worst affected country in Europe - it’s horrifying. Maybe we needed to take action much sooner & clamp down much harder. I’m in Cornwall which has a relatively low number of cases/deaths but unbelievably we still have selfish entitled idiots who think the rules don’t apply to them & they are damn well going to come down for their holiday!

Nursing homes, hospital care for any reason, funerals, within households where someone already had it. Military ships or camps, prisons & gaols, too. Most people are social distancing so it's pretty hard to catch anywhere else, tbh.

Everyone else can stay home 24/7 and cv19 will still transmit lots in those places.

All the people who need to go to those places to do their work, they get exposed, too. So then they might share with their household...

ps: if cv19 spread so easily "in a cloud" behind cyclists then Netherlands would have a much higher r0 than most the rest of Europe. They don't.

Buses, trains, planes, shops, GP’s, hospitals, all hot beds got infection transmission

If you look at the graph of UK deaths per day, you can see that the curve is starting to flatten.

A member of a remote tribe in the Amazon caught it and died, so what chance have the rest of us got? He was only 15. As has been said, the lockdown is to stop everyone getting it at once, in attempt to at least give the NHS some chance at coping. We will probably all get it at some point and many posting on MN now will be dead this year or the next from Covid-19. I don't expect to survive, but then I'm not known for my optimism. I'm like Marvin the paranoid android from THGTTG - only not so cheerful.

@daisypond that's it. You've hit the nail on the head. It's been made absolutely clear that you can continue to work if you genuinely can't work from home.

Lots of people have misunderstood and think that only key or essential workers can continue but that's simply not true.

I'm not saying this is right, but it's what the guidelines say and so it's what people are doing.

In my street we have a cleaner, plumber, builder, two engineers, one person who works in printing, two social workers, four people who work in the local Tesco, two teachers, a nursery nurse, three nhs workers and probably more who are working as normal.

I'm a dog Walker. I usually walk dogs in groups of four. I enter at least 15 houses each day, and take dogs for lovely adventures in the countryside. I decided that the right thing to do was to stop working. I felt unsafe and that I could spread the virus so easily. I will get no help from the government, but I felt it wrong to continue as I can afford to live.

However, most local dog walkers have continued because they can.

So many people are carrying on as normal and spreading the virus as they go.

If you look at the graph of UK deaths per day, you can see that the curve is starting to flatten.*

Only until we slowly start returning to normality then it will spike again and there will be another lockdown to stop the NHS getting overwhelmed.

Rinse and repeat until either we have pretty much all had it and gain herd immunity or a vaccine is made available for everyone.

Both clearly many months of not years away

Plus many people are still shopping frequently.

My local 'Range' is open. I drive past whilst delivering my dad's shopping. It looked packed. I'm not sure how they are allowed to be open.

Many reasons. One being because of people like my FIL who are still insistent on doing non essential work. Also those who ask for and allow non essential work, especially in their homes. He’s turning someone’s garage into a ‘man cave’. Now imagine if the people in that household are key workers and come into contact with FIL and the five other workmen. It’s a vicious and selfish cycle!

Because most people are still going out or being visited every day, multiple times, even though they are sticking to the rules. Say you go to work and back, maybe using public transport, then you pop to the shop to pick up some basic shopping for your elderly or unwell mum, take it to her and have to go in to provide personal care or help with cooking/cleaning, then maybe you need to walk your dog (or Mum's dog). All essential, but as careful as you might be, you'll still come into contact with lots of people, touch lots of surfaces, breathe in lots of confined spaces. Maybe you have a child that is still going to school, so seeing other children and different staff each day as most are working on a rota basis, and maybe that child also sees their other parent, who also goes to work, etc.
Social distancing in shops and offices is woefully inadequate - my local shop has 2-metre markers for queuing, but you have to walk in between people queuing to get through the shop, and the aisles are probably not even 1 metre apart so no way to avoid others coming towards you. They have installed glass screens at the checkouts but staff work on top of one another. They have to close an aisle to restock it, which is sensible, but will mean people might have to then make another trip if they couldn't get what they needed the first time.
Then of course, there are the people still having family over each day, hosting parties, and gathering on beaches, but I'd hope this is a small minority. I walk to work and back 5 days a week and see almost nobody, which is heartening.

However - people dying now may very well have been infected before the 'lockdown' anyway, as pps have explained very well.

@peoplepleaser1 I was still food shopping fairly frequently, certainly more than normal until I became ill. Because I couldn't get everything I needed, because I couldn't buy much of what needed. I will add I have a dd with ASD and very specific food needs. That makes shopping at the moment much harder.

The first week of lockdown it took me a week of visiting shops every day to find toilet roll.

‘Only’ 657 deaths today. That’s looking more promising, although the total has passed 10000 now.

We aren't at the peak yet. Italy had dips in some days before they reached the peak.

"D"M bf is in hospital and was diagnosed yesterday.

Right up until the churches and cafes were closed they were still socialising most days.

I'm not sure about her BF but "D"M has taken every opportunity to mix with people since.

March 3rd Johnson told a press conference he'd been to a hospital, shaken hands with everyone including coronavirus patients and the British people should carry on doing that. He also said the UK has really fantastic testing facilities but that's off topic.

His father on March 17th (after lockdown was announced) said he was going to go to the pub because we should all get coronavirus and get it over with. Rachael defended him on Loose Women.

There's a few role models there for people to copy and Johnson's standing in the country has gone up!

especially given theres a huge amount of undetected cases as well

You've kind of answered your own question. We haven't been doing enough testing and there has been fuck all attempt at contact tracing. The virus is still spreading because we haven't a clue where it is.

Also the government have advised those with symptoms to 'isolate' with the rest of their household, who of course then have a very high chance of catching it, and to only isolate for 7 days, which is half the amount of time recommended by WHO.

And we haven't shut down non-essential industry which means that loads of people who are not 'key workers' are still having to go into work and lots of employers are not adhering to the social distancing rules. Warehouses, call centres and construction seem to be the worst offenders and the HSE has suspended routine health and safety inspections as non-essential! Also this makes public transport much busier and provides opportunities for spread between key workers, non-essential workers and those whose nearest shops are a bus ride away.

Frontline NHS and care workers have inadequate PPE and, because so many staff are off sick or self isolating, they are having to work extremely long hours which means they are in contact with huge amounts of the virus.

All the hostile environment measures that led to the Windrush scandal are still in place so a fuckton of people have no recourse to public funds and so will not take time off work even if they or a household member are unwell. Also there are quite a lot of people who will not seek medical help because they fear a huge NHS bill and/or their details being passed to the home office.

Our death rate will also be higher because nobody is getting any medical care until they are struggling to breathe and their lips are going blue.

Of course I could have got all this wrong. It might just be because someone sat on a bench for a bit.

The weekend before lockdown was ridiculously busy in the supermarkets - with queues like Christmas, as people were in full panic buying mode, going from one supermarket to another to try to get supplies. Throughout the week before, cafes, pubs, restaurants etc were still opening despite being "advised" not to and people were going to them in droves for "one last pint or one last meal", Stupid people have caused it. It takes an average of 3 weeks for people to die of it, so people dying this weekend caught it during that last weekend of crazy shopping after the week of crazy socialising. Hopefully the death rate will now start to fall as we're coming into 3 weeks since the proper lock down. But even then, there'll still be a few hundred per day simply because people aren't doing what they're told and of course, some people are still in contact such as delivery drivers, shop workers, etc who can't really self isolate and don't have PPE.

I didn't socialise or go crazy. I've been doing as I'm told. I do however need to feed my family and the lack of stock meant travelling to several shops.

Incubation of up to three weeks, then up to four weeks for someone to die.
Lock down will have a huge effect on new cases, but it takes time to show.