The elephant in the room which is why these measures won’t work.....

[TransplantedScouser]

It’s not shops spreading covid or garden centres or people going on walks........

It’s also largely not down to offices or workplaces or even pubs and restaurants.

Two things :

Schools because children are known infection vectors

And people visiting friends and family

If the government said we’ll keep open the economy but you can’t see your friends and family in private settings then it would probably have a bigger effect

Sadly the latter is impossible to police and you get people saying “why can I go to the pub but not see my mother in her house”

And it’s because friends and family do not socially distance when there is not someone making them. At least in public there are monitors to come extent in the form of external people and staff.

It’s people like my 76 year old mum giving her friend a lift to the supermarket once a week so they are in the same car for over half an hour

Or having my aunt and uncle over to visit - well we sit on separate chairs - yes, in a small living room with the windows closed because you are old and feel cold

Or my friends kids running up to give us a hug when we pass them on the street.

Closing the economy down is a smoke screen because what actually needs to be done is impossible to police

I don't think any government will succeed in eradicating visiting family and friends for well on night over a year in duration. Unless they actually shoot people or weld them into their houses, Chinese style.

Its unrealistic. Lockdown is an untested social experiment - there is no evidence-based data to show that locking down the UK will be (a) effective or (b) eradicate a virus. We know that human beings, being human beings, will display a certain level of non-compliance. What we need to know is the evidence-based data for that non-compliance and whether its been factored into the decision making. If not, lockdown seems likely to fail and to be more about political face-saving and ensuring electability.

Constant failing posts calling people stupid for doing this and that are equally likely to be futile. Mainly because viruses such as this are so transmissable and ONE single non-complying individual can result in a huge number of cases. It might even be that lockdowns, by prolonging the initial course of the virus, actually create ideal conditions for more infectious strains to predominate. We just don't know, because they have never been properly tested or backed up by evidence.

And no, I haven't broken any of the rules!

I agree, I've mentioned my experience before on other threads. The virus has spread throughout my husband's side of the family, and it was because we weren't following the rules and all 4 children ans respective families visited MIL in the space of 4 days. 5 cases from those 5 days, ultimately.

DH and I didn't catch it though. I don't know how as we were with her for hours while she was symptomatic with 'a cold' at that point.

I went babysitting in the mid 00s for a family. I remember a night where one member was sick in bed with the flu. I can't remember the details of that night because it was so long ago. The person was a teenager. I probably checked on him in his room. A few days later I came down sick with the same dose.

This is the reason we have household restrictions. To slow the spread of the virus. If everybody did that we would be in a better way. Naturally there are times when it's essential to visit someone else's home but people need to stop finding loopholes and just stay at home for social reasons.

Yes private mixing is one of key transmission places and hardest to enforce

Hopefully people will adhere. I’m so far from even considering mixing inside hopefully majority is too

My village has high levels in a relatively low level county. The numbers of cars that arrive outside people's houses on weekend afternoons clearly shows lots of mixing indoors still going on. I work for a care service and many of the service users are visited b lots of family members who don't wear face coverings or socially distance - the they expect us to carry on regardless when the older people get Covid.

@Mabel24

While professional sports are continuing and the DM is full of photos of 'celebrities' fannying about on beaches in far flung places, why should all the little people be expected to comply?

Seems to me that lockdowns don't work unless it's done like NZ did - ie close down the country. No-one in, no-one out and all flights cancelled (not that i want the NZ approach btw, just pointing out that the pretendy UK lockdown is never going to work, and guess who will be blamed?).

I could be fined for leaving my local authority area, but live near a major airport and flights are arriving all the time with no checks.

Why not try a different approach? The vulnerable shield and the rest of us get back to work, learning and living.

Because the vulnerable and those shielding are STILL catching it in hospitals, care homes, and their own homes, due to it being taken in by the staff/carers etc., who are socialising and mixing outside the "shielding" environment and still not taking cross-infection etc seriously.

My OH has regular infusions at our local hospital day treatment unit re his cancer. Otherwise our entire household is shielding properly. Going to the hospital is his only time out of the house except for socially distanced walks. He has to tell the nurses every single time to change their gloves and wipe down the blood pressure cuff and oxymeter as they move from patient to patient. You'd really think that nurses giving cancer treatments to ECV patients wouldn't need to be told that kind of basic hygiene.

If nurses aren't protecting their patients, then it's clearly impossible to "shield" the vulnerable and explains why infection rates are running rampant in hospitals.

@TwoLeftSocksWithHoles

That's why we're not allowed to mix households with elephants, I suppose.

@TwoLeftSocksWithHoles

I have just snorted coffee.

A relative of mine has been on FB banging on about ‘Covidiots’ spreading it , yet if you look at his photos of Xmas day he was in a family members house with three households mixing 🙄

"Rishi Sunak said earlier today that Boris Johnson responded decisively to new information."
That would be a first. I guess he's hardly likely to say "The Unions and the scientists in combination were too strong for us to argue with and Boris finally had to give in" is he.

Quite. Boris Johnson only responds once Nicola Sturgeon and Keir Starmer have made him look a fool and (poor) Chris Whitty has put the PM's arm up his back and threatened to break it if he doesn't fucking listen.

I too think schoolkids and people mixing heedlessly are the main vectors. We need more of those appalling pictures on the news like the ones from north Italy back in March; people are just not taking it seriously enough any more.

The reason it wobt just disappear is nature and evolution of a thing that has been perfected to survive longer than the human race has been around.

Perfected by whom?

We have exactly the same evolutionary time as this virus.
If anything, the human species has been around for longer than this type of coronavirus, which has just crossed species barriers.
We have an immune system that has been selected to fend off various viruses.
While this virus would lead to a huge death toll that would be unacceptable in moral terms, it doesn't look likely to lead to our extinction, even without containment measures.

Here in Wales our hospital transmissions are huge, whether it be covid, norovirus or flu. I have no idea how they are in England though.

If nurses aren't protecting their patients, then it's clearly impossible to "shield" the vulnerable and explains why infection rates are running rampant in hospitals.

Very true. It was true for many hospital-borne infections and made more acute now.

Well, I got infected in hospital but I'm pretty sure it was because the lady in the next bed on our non-covid ward came in with it asymptomatically.
My swabs had come back negative. She was admitted on Thursday and on Saturday there was a panic to discharge everyone home who could safely be sent hone (me included, thankfully) to SD for 2 weeks; the rest had to all be put in side rooms.

I was aware - thanks to excellent hospital confidentiality and the practice of having loud nursing handovers on the ward* - that she was in because she'd not been taking her blood pressure medication and, consequently, her BP had rocketed and she blacked out.

The lucky thing, as she told me over and over again, was that her "carer"**, daughter and grownup granddaughter were all in the kitchen having a cup of tea when she tripped over trying to put her knickers on.

Don't know if I caught Covid directly from her (when I took the ward phone from her and put it back after she'd had a call, because she couldn't work out what to do), or from staff who did my obs after grappling her onto the commode, but I blame her family not the hospital.

*It's okay: they did it in a clever code, talking about us by our bed numbers, not our names.

**I use inverted commas as I presume an absolutely bona fide carer should have been ensuring she had her medication, helped her with her knickers and sat having tea with two people from two other households.

Bearing in mind that Covid's said to be highly infectious and the "new strain" even more so, I've wondered myself about the many groups where only one person has it and the rest appear to have escaped

I'm no epidemiologist so can't possibly explain this, but it does seem more is going on that we know. Either way it appears to pose more questions around the narrative of "it'll sweep the entire population if we don't isolate"

not sat...

Godsake, LaMa!

I totally agree op. My area went into the previous equivalent of Tier 3 at the end of July. I haven’t seen my mum (lives 250 miles away, alone, DF died nearly 30 years ago)since then and the only people who have been in my house since then have been the boiler man and plasterer (ceiling collapsed). It’s so frustrating that I see people breaking the rules all round me!

Two things:

Schools because children are known infection vectors

And people visiting friends and family

To me, it's been clear from the start. But most people are just thoughtless. Add to that, a fair bit of "exceptionalism" - "Oh I think I'm allowed to break the rules, because blah blah blah. ..."

If the many posts on MN pleading "exceptionalism" are anything to go by, there's rather a lot of this about.

people are fatigued and personal responsibility has gone out the window
Remember lockdown 1 everyone would SD when they passed you in the street, shop etc?
Not sure the same will happen this lockdown, which is a real shame as I think these are ideal conditions to hunker down and hibernate till this thing passes, which it will.
I would much rather go the extra mile now in the hope that Easter looks promising but i fear we are few and far between as people seem to have a this won't happen to me mentality
Interestingly I know a lot more people who have been exposed to or have the virus now so hopefully that will spur people on to keep low key for the winter months, which are dark, wet, cold and we're stoney broke from Crimbo...all in the hope that we will have some form of normality come summer

The virus will not lead to our extinction, rather it constitutes a selective pressure for us to evolve a genome which is resistant to it

Of course schools, workplaces, restaurants et cetera increase the spread. No doubt people visiting family and friends does to but it's not so easy to stop that. It's not really the elephant in the room. Some people either just don't get or they don't care about other people it as evidenced by the number of "just shield the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with it" posters. It doesn't seem to occur to them that if it was possible to do that we wouldn't have such a high death rate even with lockdown.

People have had an excuse for being 'exceptional' and the rules are only for everyone else. Dominic Cummings not being sacked.

It's care homes and hospitals that are the major problem.
Care homes in particular - and most residents and staff STILL haven't been fully vaccinated.

1. Some people don't care at all about the regulations and don't feel the need to justify their behaviour
2. Some people aren't capable of understanding it
3. Some people are deliberately making excuses as to why they can't comply and need to justify breaking rules as if they are somehow above them.

So the elephant doesn't actually matter. The elephant is irrelevant.

I’m really glad you you said friends/family & school children in schools. I was getting ready to shout ‘CHILDREN DO NOT SOCIAL DISTANCE IN SCHOOLS’ - they hug, jump on each other, lick each other (yes they do), share food and drink and MASKS (again yes they do), roll around on the field, chase each other, forget to use a handkerchief...I could go on. I’m talking about teenagers here.

So, thank you OP for saying family/friend’s homes, cars etc AND schools.

Rishi Sunak said earlier today that Boris Johnson responded decisively to new information

New information? They think we’re idiots.