Chris Whitty in The Times today - don't meet friends and family unnecessarily

[MrsMiaWallis]

"Emergency patients will be turned away from hospitals, causing “avoidable deaths”, unless the public starts obeying the lockdown, England’s chief medical officer warns today.
In a stark intervention designed to shock, Professor Chris Whitty warns that everyone who meets friends and family unnecessarily is a “link in a chain” that threatens the lives of vulnerable people"

Worth noting. I had to pick up a prescription from my local town and was surprised to see so many people - mainly middle aged women, some of whom I know and had always seemed like rational intelligent people - walking around town and chatting on the pavements, unmasked, no social distancing.

Apologies I don't know how to do share tokens.

I honestly feel like some sort of Cassandra most days. DD is off nursery. Her nursery has had cases. Other local nurseries have had cases. Friends are keeping their kids in because the messaging is that nurseries are safe, and any cases have been in other rooms within the nursery. About 1/3 of us have kids off - despite the fact that it's causing havoc with work - but lots of people are saying "Well, the government says it's fine for them to open so...".

We were told schools were safe on Sunday 3rd January. They were unsafe by 8pm on the 4th, except for those people who'd already gone back of course.

The politics may be idiotic but the facts are still that b117 is much more contagious. It’s worth noting that numbers went up quickly at the end of the last lockdown in November which meant it wasn’t enough to constrain b117.

If people would rather pop their clogs than live like this then they need to consider that their becoming ill and taking up a hospital bed will mean the person who gets cancer, has a stroke or heart attack may well be denied treatment. Considering a vaccine is now available, not being careful because you're fed up of restrictions is totally irresponsible. Plus its an extremely unpleasant way to die, I'm sure they'd think differently while slowly suffocating.

@badpuma

The behaviour you describe is perfectly legal and was in the first lockdown as well. The differences now are nurseries being open, a huge additional number of employers refusing to allow WFH and the meet one person for exercise rule. All of these can be managed by the government.

For starters, if they actually mean that they want to reduce transmission, the work from home if you can guidance needs to be significantly beefed up, and industry sectors such as construction told to close. Schools then need to have a much tighter range of children in.

Meeting one friend for a walk outdoors makes fuck all difference while people are still mixing en masse indoors at work, school, nursery and on public transport.

Completely agree.

Instead of 'guilt tripping' people who meet one other person outside for a walk/run (which I gather is safe) then maybe they should be attempting to actually enforce the inside rules that are being broken/abused.

Grrrrrrrrr

notevenat20

I also fail to see why talking to someone at a distance outside is any risk whatsoever to anyone

“It’s just a question of whether they will breathe in any of the air that you breathe out. I think of it like this. If they had terrible breath or even BO, are you close enough that you could tell? If so, you are too close.“

Indeed. Only need to look at people vaping to see how far breath travels.

@notevenat20 you meeting your friend for a walk outside might not spread coronovirus. But if every person in your town/county region does this it's increasing social interactions by hundreds of thousands of events and significantly increasing the risk.

I don’t know why people need to be told this. Surely it’s common sense. The new strain of the virus spreads more easily. If you’re standing close to another person tiny droplets can spread between you. It’s not rocket science. Most people won’t stay 2m apart and maybe with the new variation that isn’t far enough. The only way to reduce the spread is not to meet up at all with other people. Why can’t people understand this?

media melodrama fatigue -this. Just this. Too long. Too much scaremongering. Yes the issues in the hospitals are real but......

The trouble is there is no one source of infections although some of the biggest problems are hospitals and schools and workplaces which can't be made fully safe or fully shut

Eg hospitals, they try to put people in covid or none covid wards on admission, but you then discover you have an asymptotic person in the nine covid ward, and there you have a ward full of covid patients

And a few more nhs staff also, which is why they want the full,protection on all wards but that's been refused so far

@Atalune

Yes.

Shut nurseries. Tighten up school access, close more work places.

There’s no point inflicting so much misery on people - and things like closing nurseries has a huge impact - if you don’t have a long term game plan. An incredibly sharp, painful lockdown coupled with heightened border controls and travel restrictions, sure. You know where you’re going. But we’ve been through this all before with the spring lockdown last year followed by the summer relaxation, reimportation of the virus, back to a winter lockdown.

If enough people were sticking to the rules well enough then we wouldn't have more people in hospital than we did in the first peak.

Whitty is right.

That's inconvenient but it's still right.

We are going to have to reduce the amount of contact we have with people.

And no, it's not the same as LD1 - when there were no bubbles and no +1 for outdoor exercise, and no outdoor exercise for the CEV.

@MrsMiaWallis

"Emergency patients will be turned away from hospitals, causing “avoidable deaths”, unless the public starts obeying the lockdown, England’s chief medical officer warns today. In a stark intervention designed to shock, Professor Chris Whitty warns that everyone who meets friends and family unnecessarily is a “link in a chain” that threatens the lives of vulnerable people"

Worth noting. I had to pick up a prescription from my local town and was surprised to see so many people - mainly middle aged women, some of whom I know and had always seemed like rational intelligent people - walking around town and chatting on the pavements, unmasked, no social distancing.

Apologies I don't know how to do share tokens.

Usually when anyone posts stuff like this, the MN thought police will be along to tell you to STFU and stop being ridiculous.

There was a post a few days ago about people standing chatting in the supermarket and 90% of the posters laid into the OP saying she was being ridiculous.

Because if 1 in 60 have it, then for every 30 people who meet 30 other people, somebody is going for a walk with a covid positive person, and can they guarantee they will be sufficiently SD over that period that they won’t catch it, given the new strain is easier to catch.

B117 is much more infectious so there is a huge duty on the government to put in the right restrictions and make sure they're enforced. They haven't done this - primarily because the economy will be even more fucked.

Instead the police are being called to things which are not illegal and adopting a high profile heavy handed approach which then backfired leading to more rule breaches.

It's going back to the issue which has been there throughout the autumn term - people do not see why they can't chat to a friend in the street when the government are telling them it is absolutely fine to snuggle up to someone's armpit on south west trains, sit in a marginally ventilated office without a mask and have their kids licking each other in nursery.

Meeting one friend for a walk outdoors makes fuck all difference while people are still mixing en masse indoors at work, school, nursery and on public transport

It does if one of you has Covid!

People were never going to abide by such tight restrictions indefinitely, there seemed to be an awareness of that fact when we went into the first lockdown but it’s been forgotten now and people are being blamed for the virus spreading just for wanting to do the most basic of things.

At the first lockdown, people were prepared to buy into the rules because we could see how seriously the government was taking the situation by closing schools, starting furlough, the shielding scheme etc. But when the government starts issuing rules that make little sense, when people are expected to risk themselves to work with multiple people for very little money yet aren’t allowed to see their own families, then they are allowed to see their families, then they aren’t again, we start to realise that these rules are just based on opinions and we can use our own common sense.

It doesn't matter how right any of it is if people have disengaged in large numbers. You can judge people for disengaging all you like but it will make no practical difference to anything.

We are 10 months in now and for a lot of people it will feel like the boy who cried wolf. They've been warned of terrible outcomes for so long that it now has little or no impact.

But we’ve been through this all before with the spring lockdown last year followed by the summer relaxation, reimportation of the virus, back to a winter lockdown

It was perfectly obvious even at the time (search back on MN) that summer would be the time of relative freedom when we should go out and play, because all bets were off for winter.

The virus didn't go away over the summer, it was always in circulation, but at a much lower level (other viruses show this kind of seasonality as well).

We need to get to the point where the sun gets its strength back without overwhelming the NHS.

We're on Alert 5 still, and new infection numbers are extraordinarily high. A couple of London hospitals are literally full, and nearly all others are operating above the safety capacity of 92%. Thus may well be true in other places as well (I saw only the London figures from earlier this week)

Okay so the government change the law to prevent walking with one other person, and make it illegal to chat to people in the street.

Cases drop by maybe 5% but there is a huge rise in mental health problems which rehire NHS intervention.

In the meantime cases continue to rise, because the big drivers of infection haven't changed at all.

I do not accept that the current restrictions are taking an unacceptable toll on normal people.

The situation is taking an unacceptable toll on medical staff. It is taking an unacceptable toll on those who are fighting for their lives and dying.

It is not taking anything like an unacceptable toll on those too stupid or selfish to realise they need to follow some proportionate and sensible rules.

I don’t understand the call for even further restrictions before we’ve had chance to see what impact the latest ones are having??
People crying out for further sectors to close because of case and death rates seem to not understand that restrictions take a while to have an impact. Surely, you wait two weeks after the initial lockdown was put in place and re-assess??

Nurseries are kept open because they’ve been shown not to have a massive impact on cases in the community - unlike schools.
They’ve shut schools to lower the transmission rates... not because they’re worried about the actual pupils (or, dare I say it, teachers) but to stop chains of infection.

One other thing we have now that we didn’t have back in March is a vaccine roll out. This widely will have an impact on transmission as well.

I just can’t understand why people are crying out for more and more restrictions!!

@SexTrainGlue

If enough people were sticking to the rules well enough then we wouldn't have more people in hospital than we did in the first peak.

Whitty is right.

That's inconvenient but it's still right.

We are going to have to reduce the amount of contact we have with people.

And no, it's not the same as LD1 - when there were no bubbles and no +1 for outdoor exercise, and no outdoor exercise for the CEV.

I completely disagree that it is ‘rule breakers’ that are driving up infections - it is people interacting legally that is spreading the virus

I’d be surprised if the number of people catching coronavirus after chatting on the pavement runs into three figures

I don’t think this is a helpful message from Chris Whitty. The vast majority of people appear to be complying, and a small number who are not. All of the patients I have spoken to in the past few months have been doing whatever the government suggests, as have my family and friends. Those who are not compliant will never be, as there are very few consequences to their behaviour.

However, the pressure on my hospital, and mirrored around the country, is literally overwhelming. This new variant is spreading very fast, and this week, for the first time, my team were told that when doing non-AGP procedures, we would have to wear full PPE, as the Infection Control Team feel we could be at risk....despite the procedure room being under negative air pressure, air purifiers, and usual masks being worn before.

'Obey the spirit of the lockdown'

Yes, all good, then get sent to work because your employer likes you in the office, and have schools open to virtually anyone and nurseries open to all. Oh yes, and garden centres open as they are essential at this time of year???

The article is behind a paywall. Is he talking about indoors or outdoors?