The sooner people follow the rules the quicker we'll get rid of Coronavirus...

[Marcellemouse]

I've heard 2 different people say this in the past few days. What do they mean? Do people really think Coronavirus will just disappear altogether if we get the numbers low enough?

Some sort of immunity anyway - depends how quickly the virus evolves. I suppose likely endemic but no longer serious once it's no longer novel to our immune systems.

Doesn't really matter what I think anyway, I'm not the one making the rules so it's all theoretical.

We'll see what proves the higher cost in due course.

[quote RollaCola84]@3littlewords - is that it, do we all just choose one person each and then never get near to another person ever again ? Its the lack of end game that terrifies me.

I'm in tier 3 and I have to chose between my partner and my parents (again). How the fuck is anyone supposed to do that.[/quote]
Yep its shit im in exactly same position re parents and in laws. We've decided to bubble with in laws and my DB will bubble with my parents. Its still better than in lockdown when we couldn't see either. As we can Still see others outside from a distance 2m less than 6 people we will meet my DM for long walks with the dogs. I agree it's absolute pants though 😔

@MaxNormal

Some sort of immunity anyway - depends how quickly the virus evolves. I suppose likely endemic but no longer serious once it's no longer novel to our immune systems.

Doesn't really matter what I think anyway, I'm not the one making the rules so it's all theoretical.

We'll see what proves the higher cost in due course.

I think that is basically what happened in 1918 in the end, collective immunity? But at a horribly high price.

In China do you recon the students would have been allowed to attend those parties? Would people be openly slagging off the chief medical officer? Probably be no on both accounts. Western individualism of me first will make this difficult to control.

Yikes, you like a dollop of good old fashioned totalitarianism eh?

Imagine being able to 'slag off' (and openly as well) an authority figure - terrible state of affairs!

Cannot believe that people look to China as an example of how it should be done, its terrifying!

@KnightsofColumbusThatHurt

Cannot believe that people look to China as an example of how it should be done, its terrifying!

I've got my soldering iron at the ready!

Cannot believe that people look to China as an example of how it should be done, its terrifying!

Yes, they are more dangerous to society than the virus itself.

Whatever motivates you - saving lives, getting your normal life back, keeping your job, saving your business, your children having a normal education. Your kids growing up with grandparents...All of it.

Is made possible by very low levels of community transmission.

Such as in South Korea where they still go to clubs and gigs and all of it.

Rule-breakers and covid-deniers contribute to the spread and the misery and make it worse for all of us.

An ideologically blinkered government that has failed to provide the essential basic of a fit for purpose Test and Trace system makes it worse for all of us.

All the rest of us can do, is do our best not to contribute to the spread, stay positive and hope sanity prevails eventually.

If it doesn't, then this is our lives for the next couple of years at least. And we're all going to be going to a lot of funerals.

@secretllama I've had enough. We can lock up as much as we want but the virus will come again. It's not going to go anywhere. I am also yet to meet someone who has tested positive and I have a lot of family and friends. Somehow though, everyone on Mumsnet seems to personally know hundreds who have had this or have died because of it 🤷‍♀️ shall I believe anonymous strangers on a forum? Shall I believe our politicians? Or shall I believe our scaremongering media? This is the many reasons why I no longer buy into this bullshit plus back in March, I did everything to avoid it and followed every gov guideline but since losing my business in summer, which I have worked very hard for (no tourists means no business for me) I quit and no longer will hide nor will I follow any gov guidelines.

You can eliminate it, but you would need to actually have rules and enforcement that were effective.
At the moment people in the UK are still mixing, going to school, work, holidays overseas etc.
In NZ we had total lockdown. No school, no socialising, no workplaces, counting people in and out of supermarkets, no takeaways and DIY stores - like, totally nothing. No contact with other humans beyond the people that we actually shared a house with - none of that "I have mostly followed the rules" palaver. We set rules and followed them.
It was tough.
But we are a tiny country and everyone knows everyone else and our leaders were really clear that if we stuck at it, it would work. We had daily briefings and watched the numbers fall day to day so we could see the results of our efforts and it felt like each of us were doing our bit.
It was horrible.
And our borders are still closed and I haven't seen my partner since March. So that's pretty shit.
The UK has holidays overseas and "self isolating" - we have no overseas travel and anyone who does make it in, at enormous expense and only if they are a NZ passport holder, is locked up in a hotel for 14 days, at $3000 per person. They are actually locked up and arrested if they escape...how would that work in the UK, locking up all the people who insist on their right to a foreign holiday.

The UK has never done this and probably won't now because people are too pissed off and because you dragged it out, have missed that first wave opportunity to come down hard and fast on it.

So the UK will have to learn to live with it. You want foreign holidays and shopping on the High Street, you will have to live with the virus.

NZ is not perfect - we are virus free but our lives are extremely restricted.

NZ didn't so much eliminate it as prevent it ever getting a hold in the first place. That is not now an option for the UK.

Waste of time. Young people by and large ignoring it now. University students totally ignoring. Only people,observing it aren't the spreaders.

Doesn't help now with Starmer doing his holier than thou act with ridiculous circuit breaker demands....doesn't answer what happens in another 2-3 months.

This has really shown how incapable our politicians really are..can't lead and can only cow tow to the premise that we can mitigate risk from everything...well we can't so time for a better strategy

@Marcellemouse

I've heard 2 different people say this in the past few days. What do they mean? Do people really think Coronavirus will just disappear altogether if we get the numbers low enough?

They don't just need to be followed, they need to be enforced.

The police/Covid marshals are a waste of space.

@CrappleUmble

NZ didn't so much eliminate it as prevent it ever getting a hold in the first place. That is not now an option for the UK.

Absolutely - I don't know why people are talking about NZ, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, etc as if they're viable options for now. It's important that we look back and see what we could have done better for next time (and there will be more pandemics, and probably with deadlier diseases) but there's no point looking at them as models to do when we're already where we are. It's like the old joke 'How do I get to Canterbury?' 'Well, I wouldn't start from here'. It's legitimate to be angry that our response wasn't more like the countries who prevented it ever becoming endemic, but it's pointless to pretend that that's a viable path for us at this point.

Spent a lot of time watching various news channels last night.

2 things came out of it:

The majority of the public support another lockdown

The majority of young people comply as they love their parents/grandparents. This has been my experience. My ds’s, gf’s and their friends never go out. They don’t want to infect their parents. They do zoom things instead. They’re fed up and bored, but they comply.

And yet on here people seem to say the opposite to what the general feeling across the country is.

Depends whether you believe the mainstream media are trying to reflect public opinion and behaviour or trying to influence it

The opinion polls say a large minority of people (45%) supported stronger measures than the current ones a couple of weeks ago, and I would expect that's risen. Really weirdly, though, YouGov asked people whether they support every measure except only seeing six people in a private house - which seems, anecdotally, to be the least popular and most flouted rule - and found they did, but this feels like a huge omission?

I live in Essex and it does not feel like the council asking for stronger measures (despite our fairly low rates) has been popular, though obviously that's anecdotal as no actual polling has been done.

Absolutely - I don't know why people are talking about NZ, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, etc as if they're viable options for now. It's important that we look back and see what we could have done better for next time (and there will be more pandemics, and probably with deadlier diseases) but there's no point looking at them as models to do when we're already where we are. It's like the old joke 'How do I get to Canterbury?' 'Well, I wouldn't start from here'. It's legitimate to be angry that our response wasn't more like the countries who prevented it ever becoming endemic, but it's pointless to pretend that that's a viable path for us at this point.

Yes, absolutely. It's one thing to argue that eg China welding people into their homes was the lesser of two evils, but even if one thinks that, it should be obvious that we are beyond the point where it could possibly have worked. It's not about the principle of the thing at this point.

Not only can Find, Test, Trace and Isolate get us back to normal life, it can do it quicker and cheaper than any other option.

If we had been doing it properly all Summer, we wouldn't be in this position now.

I was looking up the number of cases in Australia. I have family living in New South Wales. I was astonished to see the overall cases in Australia are low in comparison to the UK and Ireland and Europe. In New South Wales the case numbers are a little bit over 4000 for the whole of New South Wales. I think that's a fantastic figure. Approximately 2600 of them cases arrived in of flights and were quarantined and never really had a chance to leak into communities.

Australia has showed us the way to go with how to handle and work with this virus. I'm very disappointed because we were in a good position after our lockdown with low case numbers and our government blew it. We should have had border controls coming into our country and quarantine measures from the start instead of trusting people to self isolate. We should have had heavy penalties from the start for people breaking isolation. None of them tools were utilised from the beginning. We would be in a better position if our government protected us from incoming travellers who may be carrying the virus.

@Hardbackwriter

The opinion polls say a large minority of people (45%) supported stronger measures than the current ones a couple of weeks ago, and I would expect that's risen. Really weirdly, though, YouGov asked people whether they support every measure except only seeing six people in a private house - which seems, anecdotally, to be the least popular and most flouted rule - and found they did, but this feels like a huge omission?

I live in Essex and it does not feel like the council asking for stronger measures (despite our fairly low rates) has been popular, though obviously that's anecdotal as no actual polling has been done.

I did that survey, I don't support closing hospitality, but the way the questions were worded it was very difficult to disagree with them- think ' do you support measures to control Coronavirus?' Or something like that. Well I do support mandatory masks, hygiene and social distancing so I had to say yes. It needed to be Moyer nuanced.

Why why would it autocorrect more to Moyer???

@TheEmojiFormerlyKnownAsPrince

Spent a lot of time watching various news channels last night.

2 things came out of it:

The majority of the public support another lockdown

The majority of young people comply as they love their parents/grandparents. This has been my experience. My ds’s, gf’s and their friends never go out. They don’t want to infect their parents. They do zoom things instead. They’re fed up and bored, but they comply.

And yet on here people seem to say the opposite to what the general feeling across the country is.

I only know of 1 person that is openly pro lockdown, everyone else I've spoken to are very much in the 'get on with it' crew. Watching media too it makes me think that the genuine people who against locking down maybe aren't speaking out at risk of sounding like they're rebelling and more likely to break the rules. No-one wants the spotlight on them whilst they sneak someone into their house.

Most of our friends understand science and maths, and care about what's best for our country and for other people - so we're all about doing what needs to be done to keep the virus at low levels so it's safer for everyone to live a normal life.

We'd prefer to have the top of the line Test and Trace system we've paid for.

But until the government gets a grip and stops spending billions on things that don't work, we'll have to have lockdowns.

I expect the government will call it "Local Lockdown" but it will affect everywhere in England but the Isle of Man, Cornwall and the Isle of Wight.

I agree the statement doesn't make much sense OP, obviously following the rules won't get rid of the virus. If everyone did follow the right rules (I don't know enough to say what those are) and if we also had effective test/trace/quarantine policies, it would help to bring case numbers down and that would allow us more wriggle room in what we do and what restrictions we can ditch. Obviously not allowing us to go back to normal since that would land us back at square one.

I am not of the 'let it spread' mindset as personally I believe that would see greater damage to the economy, education, all areas of health etc than the alternative. It would have dire effects on everyone, not just those who developed severe covid or died. If I think through the consequences of that spread realistically, it is not preferable to other approaches (not saying what we now is the best approach), not from any perspective.

Depending on the speed with which a vaccine becomes available I also don't think it would necessarily be over quicker. Listening to experts there seems to be a very widespread confidence that we will have a vaccine of some kind rolling out from next year. I think people do overestimate how much a vaccine will change things in the short term....it seems likely that many measures will persist while the efficacy and duration of protection are studied further, but in combination with other things it will make a big difference.

To me, both the statement about 'the more we follow the rules the quicker we will get rid of the virus', and also the idea that we can just let it spread and relieve some of the pressures that way, fail to see the wider picture or really think things through. I don't claim to be any kind of expert or know what is the right way forward, but I am fairly confident that those two approaches are both not the way, not as things stand.