The circuit breaker should have been discussed with head teachers on Monday & Tuesday when the scientific reports were available, announced on Wednesday, and started today for 2 weeks. Pupils should all have been given online work or paper copies for those without adequate software & devices. Some schools are on half term for 2 weeks anyway, those with 1 week to go with have had teaching and social interaction already, and can look forward to reopening school.
Those who say circuit breakers are pointless because "it'll just start again" have not understood the physiology and pathology of how viruses work. Viruses are not a factory production line- above all they need a host to thrive. If hosts stay home, they can't infect someone else.
They spread exponentially- so if you are infected and you meet 5 different people every day, at the end of the week, you haven't made potentially 35 people infected, you have potentially made at least 25,000...because those people meet 5 different people every day too. 5 is a conservative estimate, taking into account some people meeting more and some fewer. Assuming we are lucky and many people are well-rested, no medical risk factors and robust and don't catch it, let's say only 1-3% of people pick it up, that is still 250-750 people who then go on to infect hundreds more without realising it. And testing will only pick up fewer than half of those potentially 750 cases, as there are not enough appointments or testing kits being allocated.
Most adults are still not being careful enough with precautions. Teachers and school pupils have been careful because of the rules and the campaigning of unions. Some professions like musicians, bus drivers and dancers are being extremely careful because it both affects their ability to work as well as having financial implications if they don't. But many adults doing work or activities where they often don't interact with others closely forget and aren't taking any precautions- I had 2 adults on the street approach me this week and try to come up very close to my face put something in my hand when neither they nor I had masks on.
That is how case numbers in areas like Liverpool, Manchester, Lancashire, London, Essex etc are going up. Local lockdowns alone are futile because you can't stop people from crossing borders- delivery staff, production workers, etc who are going in and out of these regions- often long distance to other cities.
Schools are better off with a 2 week circuit breaker that is planned rather than sudden random closures when one of your 250-750 infected manages to get a test that is positive. Saying "but my school and town have had nothing" is also meaningless because teachers are working with the burden of a sudden random school closure on them all the time which ultimately does affect the atmosphere of classes and the delivery of teaching in some way, even with the best efforts and diligence of teachers.
We get it that you have to go to work to pay your bills- we ALL have bills to pay. But being dead won't help pay your bills. There are safer ways to approach that. Rising case numbers unchecked will eventually lead to hospitals being too full and you could be the next person catching Covid 19 and needing a hospital bed and not being able to get one- because they're all occupied, even private beds. I don't think a lot of people realise the severity of this versus their ability to pay their Netflix subscription for the next 12 months. I'm speaking as a parent of school age offspring as well as being in a family of medical, teaching and self employed professionals. We know the implications from competing view points.