No point in lockdown anymore

[LifeMatters]

All my neighbours seem to think that we are in a paid staycation by the government and social distancing are out the door.
Everyone around where I live has friends and family over, are having picnics together on the grass in front of their flats, the roads are busier than ever.
It's crazy! There's no point in making this country suffer any more so better all let's just go to work and what happens happens.

People are taking advantage of the paid time off and not staying indoors. What is the point of this lockdown if people are not following it anymore?

My next door neighbors had friends and family over all this week...it's crazy.

You can pass the virus on without even having it yourself.
On clothing, on a parcel, via touching a surface than someone then touches etc.
You may not be infected but have it on your person.

Tangina

I'm in Scotland and people are massively observant of lockdown here. It feels very distant -only about 13 people in itu in the whole of the Lothians but still haven't seen anyone flouting lockdown. I wonder if Scotland is different?

Scotland, as you know, isn't just one small town. Where I am in Leith there are people breaking it. Groups of teenagers and young men in the playpark and on bike rides, groups of joggers, people with personal trainers, blokes sitting in a group drinking beer by the beach, people hanging about the precinct. Not leaving space when they're out walking. One woman gave me a full body barge as she was running for a bus. No, Scotland isn't different.

I think if we had started from a stricter position it would psychologically worked better in the long term, because you have more to relax from. So you can relax to the situation we have now when people are mentally tiring. You get the illusion of meaningful progress without harming efforts to contain the virus. There is definitely a bending of the rules going on because the government has 'given an inch' in the uk. And the mixed messages from government and unnamed sources aren't helping.

We needed a road map out being published two weeks ago too. We could see everyone else doing one but we didn't have a plan and that's lead to a vacuum in communication, masses of speculation and frankly a lack of leadership into which all these rumours have been allowed to gain traction.

I fear we are dangerously close to 'fucking it up' tbh.

The Times is reporting tonight that the government figures show that the number of new daily cases is 5600. Yet in reality its more likely to be 20,000 new cases a day. That's logistically a problem as despite increasing our testing capacity it doesn't appear we are picking up nearly 3/4 of infections through testing at this point.

This renders our ability to switch to track and trace insufficient to stop the spread outside lockdown.

This means we have to push the number of daily infections down even further to get to that point. That's not consistent with relaxing restrictions in any form next week.

Both the Guardian and Times are doing something of a reversal in tone coming from government about ending lockdown with the Guardian stating that Johnson was particularly pissed at the rumours of that. So that does suggest there's expectation management kicking in about what Johnson will say on Sunday.

The way the government has been run particularly over the past 3 years (but not exclusively confined to this period) via rumours and leaks is indicative of a lack of authority from No10 and numerous individuals using the press to lobby their own personal causes via the public who don't really realise how manipulative this is and how much it lacks transparency about vested interests and conflicts of interest.

I think some critism of government has been unfair at times, but most has been legitimate and about trying to improve things rather than undermine. We've had criticism of the press for being 'too negative' or asking too many difficult questions which is farcical when the role of media is supposed to be to hold power to account, not to make all the right noises so the public feel happy / motivated etc etc.

We are now headed again to a point (like the timing if the initial lockdown) where decisions aren't as timely as perhaps they should be and we have days of the 'he said, she said circus'.

It smacks of indecision and dithering.

Why make Sunday into an event, when we should all just be told what the plan is without the entire bloody charade?

We can't claim that what is happening in the UK is being led by the science when all that is going on. Politics is playing a much bigger role than it should be. Politicians should be grey and boring and hard working and almost invisible to our lives rather than these larger than life personas which detract us from the issues at hand which we should be focused on.

And this is showing up particularly badly right now and it's ultimately showing up in how people are behaving on the streets.

For the first 3 weeks all was quiet but now it’s almost gone back to normal. Our new neighbour has had 6 men round today helping him do his garden. The other side haS had her granddaughter there all day. I don’t agree we should have been locked down earlier. Some People were never going to stick with it for long.

The a science isnt giving straightforward data, and we dont know the virus particularly well.
It is little wonder we are arent getting a clear strategy.

I think the government have done a good job of appearing fairly calm, and this is important, and I also think they've really tried to keep business going, as best as they can.

However, they also seem as unsure about some stuff as the rest of us.

I don’t agree we should have been locked down earlier. Some People were never going to stick with it for long.

As far I as understand it, locking down earlier would have meant a shorter lockdown so that would not have been a problem.

Excellent post @RedToothBrush

@RubbishRobotFromTheDawnOfTime

Yes exactly that! Saw this uploaded on fb yesterday

www.facebook.com/503082052/posts/10158526190022053/?d=n

People are still being pretty god here, can’t comment on the cars, not sure re numbers.

Lots of good posts on here, but yes government in a difficult place atm. Furlough ending, mass redundancies, no antibody testing as thought a while ago, and the app seems to have an issue.

@RedToothBrush good post, well written

The a science isnt giving straightforward data, and we dont know the virus particularly well.
It is little wonder we are arent getting a clear strategy

I agree the science isn't straightforward atm. But strong signals that we were still further away from the end of lockdown then were being cited by various sectors of the press haven't helped. All this business about constantly talking about green shoots have been overcooked. Its rarely been stressed in a forceful manner that once you hit the peak you still have the mountain to climb down and that you are more vulnerable on the descent. We could have had a few nice Mallory versus Hillary type illustrations to drive the point home in a way that gets the message across well. Economically if we can't get things under control, we will face even more issues going forward. There isn't a short cut on this and there's been a lot of people trying to push this.

Frankly some honesty about the gap between where we are in terms of being able to switch to track and trace rather than the nonsense about how we've reached the target of 100,000 tests wouldn't have gone a miss for starters. (we hadn't. We fudged the data to save the red faces of certain ministers)

This inability to talk from a position which isn't realistic (either to 'keep up moral' or to save ministers embarrassment) has undermined the integrity of the government.

Of course they have a fair idea of where we need to be in terms of their 5 goals but they don't want to state what out target points are. That's stupid. If people have goals and targets they can process things better. Other countries have done this. That's managing expectations. And the ability of other countries to put together meaningful plans has only added to British frustrations and sense of a lack of where we are in the process (and some sense of how far we still have to go). Yes people want to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but they need to know that the light they see is daylight not a train coming. Instead we have this sense that the end of lockdown is a mirage in the desert that keeps moving away from us which isn't good for mental health.

Yes the situation is fluid but Johnson's absence and Raab's unwillingness to step up (step on toes) has been a huge factor over the last month.

Having some direction and proper leadership has been missing from the UK strategy and at times we've simply not had a strategy at all (care homes complained for weeks at the lack of guidance for their sector which is inexcusable). We've just had far too many PR stunts and a lack of proper expectation management.

I don't expect the government to be perfect during this crisis. Trying to pull the wool over our eyes to hide mistakes is worse than the mistakes themselves though. I want the mistakes to be properly acknowledged so they can be rectified as quickly as possible. I think we've really forgotten the importance of this in terms of management of the country across the board tbh. (and its certainly not restricted to the Conservative party).

To be honest, I thought Beth Rigby’s point was excellent. If a relaxation of the restrictions is going to be made, why not tell us now? What’s going to be different between Sunday and Monday?

The weather. Massive drop in temperature after Saturday.

Excellent posts RedToothBrush

@Oblomov20 and @LifeMatters - I live in Surrey too, and round here it's the opposite of what you describe. 6 ft between each person queuing. No signs of meet ups anywhere. The woods and heaths are busier than ever with joggers and cyclists and dog walkers, but people are hopping into the bushes to avoid each other when we pass.I've not seen any new cars parked in our street for weeks.

Vast majority of people in my immediate area have been fine. But further into Sunderland (Im on the outskirts) is a mess. Nobody taking any notice and thats showing in the figures.

However I do have two neighbours who keep having family around and thinking they are above the rest of us when it comes to adhering to lockdown are the ones who are out banging their pots and pans the loudest every Thursday evening. So frustrating

I agree OP. This is probably why the infection /death rates aren't going down.

So the government (in the end all of us) are paying for this nice extended holiday. It's a big joke.

@SabrinaTheTeenageBitch my neighbour that has friends and family around all day long does the same. She is outside @7.55 waiting for everyone to start clapping and she bangs her pots and pans so that everyone around can see how dedicated she is.
Such a hypocrite 🤷🏻‍♀️

Without the current measures, the numbers would be horrific.
Nobody should be imagining the current numbers prove it's not working, that would be the gravest of misperceptions.

It’s a free for all where I live in the north west too. Our street of (almost all over 70) neighbours have been having family round the whole time. The only ones who haven’t are us and next door who are also the only households who are under 70. The ones across the road had 4 separate car loads of visitors on Easter Sunday.

We tried to go for our bike ride along the prom the other day (weekday) and it was full of people sitting eating 99 style ice creams (no idea where they got them from!). There’s definitely a big increase in the amount of teenager meeting up to hang out. We had to abandon the prom on the end because social distancing was impossible.

On Wednesday, there was even a cricket match happening on the football field in our village 🤨

Also, not related to social distancing, but it seems like every other house has a very strong smell of weed emulating from it 🤢

I was happy to comply fully with lockdown when it was first introduced. In fact both DH and I had coronavirus like symptoms so had to self isolate anyway.

But at the start we thought there was a vaccine coming soon and a reliable antibody test. I was hopeful that the antibody test would be rolled out quickly and those who had had the virus could get back to some semblance of normality. It's become obvious that this will not be the case. In parallel with that the government changes the goal posts so lockdown which originally was to ease the curve for the NHS now becomes linked into 5 conditions that the government through their course of action have bungled. Particularly number of infections which is clearly going to go up as unless you were a member of the royal family you couldn't get tested in the early days.

Then we started to get the stats, and sad though they are it's clear that whilst coronavirus-19 is undeniably deadly to some of the population, if you're under 40, don't have an underlying condition, are not obese, then the chance of dying from it is incredibly low indeed. The high death rate was caused by not stopping travel from infected areas earlier in the day - pretty sure we caught it when out for lunch amongst many French supporters for the France/Scotland rugby game - and ridiculously stupid decision
s not to cancel big gatherings earlier in the day.

So whilst I'll continue to comply with most of the guidance - like the Scottish CMO and other leading figures I'll apply a bit of common sense to it. So I have started going out for exercise a couple of times a day sometimes as I need to run for the sake of my own mental health and it's hard to do that with our dog. We had a delicious takeaway last night and supported a great local restaurant. I go to the shops more than once a week because a) its not illegal and b) we sometimes run out of stuff and I don't like cheese in my tea.

We need very clear messages from the government about what the goal of this is now and how we will achieve it. I'm not going to stay in for months on end, just in time for this to get worse in Autumn when hospitals will start to get fuller because of seasonal flu anyway.

An example of poor explanation and expectation management:

Contact apps don't work unless the community spread is at a very low point.

Otherwise you end up with massive 'outtages' of workplaces or areas because so many are told they've been in contact with a case (and crucially this includes key workers)

It's being sold as a magic bullet type solution, but it could be very economically damaging (more so than now) if we aren't at the right point for it. It's far from something that can 'free us' from the current situation.

The potential for false positives is too high particularly at this point.

Unless we have reliable community based testing (at the gp - home kits are too risky as they may not be done properly) and quick enough turn around times, an app could cause far more problems than it solves. (Think amazon warehouse - also are workers permitted to have mobiles on in such workplaces anyway?)

But nope. We've had tons of guff about how an app will work (cos that's what other countries are doing) without the important explanation of how it's also limited in its ability to be useful by other factors.

Almost all of my neighbours and all of my family have been isolating so a lot of people are still complying. But one neighbour had a party yesterday but she's a carer in a nursing home. The selfishness of some people is staggering. The media are fueling the rise in people meeting and going out - even today there are reports that it could be lifted despite the government saying very little will change and lockdown will continue. If they kept the message going in line with what the government have said, not what may happen, there would be less people going out. The message is not consistent

While board yesterday I read a rather heavy report into the modelling used by Ferguson and Imperial College. Until very recently the actual model they used had never been released and the reason was that it was using computer code that was over 30 years old. The Govt had called in Microsoft to sort out and they failed to get it to where it should be as it needed rewriting. Whilst it still has some validity the small bugs can cause massive variances of outcomes, ie if 80,000 deaths.

Part of me starts thinking have we locked down and wrecked the economy on the basis of this standard of evidence and whether using the Swedish model might have been better given the number of non Covid deaths occurring and getting stored up for the future

@CoronaIsComing Maybe people are bored so are buying more weed?

Bloody autocorrect.....bored.