Tighter restrictions? What else can be "tighter"??

[R2221]

Schools closed, work places closed, nailbars, hairdressers, clothes shops, closed. My high street is dead and a couple of big shops are permanently closing down. We've been totally indoors, going out only to get grocery and exercise.

Oh, gyms are closed, no play dates, birthdays, dinners or even coffee with friends. WHAT ELSE CAN BE DONE TO STOP THE SPREAD??? What would "tighter" restrictions mean? To me, next tighter level means no grocery and exercise :(

My local hospital is totally full. I don't understand why.

@cormorantes

Lockdown has been less than a week! Why are you expecting it to have made an impact yet. Clearly it should have been enforced much earlier but it has not been nearly long enough to have shown it working yet

This! I'm sort of amazed at the foot-stamping impatience of people going 'well, it didn't work overnight so we'll have to make it tougher!'.

Schools are hardly closed right now. Uptake of spaces is massive.

That needs to get sorted.

Many schools are 40/50% full due to the government saying anyone with just 1 KW parent or with out a laptop, can have a space.

That probably isn’t helping much.

The main ones are:

1 hour exercise a day at most

and

Restrict the list of key workers allowed to send children to school

and

Shut the same list of places that were shut in April

And no click and collect.

@StrippedFridge Yes it is. Its almost as if the Government WANT there to be a huge backlash against the NHS. I wonder why

I’m sure last time a lot of online shops like Next/Debenhams etc closed their online shops so that staff were not working in the warehouses etc. and there was no need to attend the store to collect.
Places like non essential construction could be closed. Garden centres and coffee shops are not essential.
Schools should be open to critical workers only and not for the excessive list of ‘key workers’ children too.
There are loads of people that I know in office jobs who continue to go to work but actually there is no reason why they can’t work from a computer at home.

They could shut 'facial aesthetic clinics' aka Botox & laser salons. We have one near us that is open as the department of health deems them 'clinical services'.

Total Bollocks and makes a mockery of the lockdown idea.

It’s more likely to be spreading with Jin households, often in poorer areas where people live in smaller households and have more family members and also where people are still going out to work to earn what they can as statutory sick pay and universal credit aren’t enough.

We need to stop blaming people, who have actually been compliant, and start looking at the structural factors.

Also allowing London and Greater London to be tier 2 was surely asking for trouble. Large swathes of the North have been tier 3 for months.

The most sensible thing the government could do would be to pay people their full wages so that they can afford to self-isolate for 10 days. So they obviously won’t bother with that.

I think there needs to be a limit on bubbles. I’d propose no one being allowed both a support bubble and a childcare bubble - they should be allowed to pick one or the other.

Hartlepool council could close the car parks in Seaton Carew....
Hords of visitors this weekend. I gave up walking my ddog and went home.
They closed them last lockdown... Ticket meters are closed for the season so no loss to them if they close. A town with 700 +cases in the last 7 days... Blood do something!

I think important ones are :

Shutting garden centres and other shops like b and m and the range.
No click and collect
Shutting coffee shops and places like Gregg's
Shutting nurseries to all apart from KW and v children
Changing the law so that 2 parents much be KW out of the home to require a school place.

I don't imagine they will impose a curfew

Do we really think they will remove support bubbles? This is devastating 😩

Meanwhile Piers Morgan flew out to Antigua after guilt tripping and emotionally blackmailing the public over family Christmases.
But who comes in for the flack ............the general public.

There's not much else to close apart from tightening up schools and closing nurseries. I really hope they don't stop support bubbles, I will be so angry if they stop them before closing nurseries and schools properly. The difference my under 1 yr bubble has made is enormous, if they stop the only thing I can do I don't think I'll actually comply.

@MercyBooth

Meanwhile Piers Morgan flew out to Antigua after guilt tripping and emotionally blackmailing the public over family Christmases. But who comes in for the flack ............the general public.

He is an assole and blocks ppl if they say anything

Nurseries closed
Curfew at 110pm
Masks inside no exemptions
Tighter definition of key workers for schools
Parents to take responsibility for their teenagera

I know most people have only been in this lockdown a week but where we are, we have been in tier 4 just over 3 weeks now and the numbers are increasing at a dramatic rate still. This is what worries me.

For starters:

They could close all the non-essential shops that are open for click and collect (e.g. Next, Curry's etc).

They could close some shops which are supposedly open for essential supplies but which aren't remotely essential (e.g. The Range, M&S clothing floors).

They could close drive-in cafes because it is not essential to buy coffee to takeaway. Just drink it at home.

They could stop you from being able to go for socially-distanced exercise with another person (or at least stop you from being able to meet a different person each day which is really fucking stupid ).

They could restrict support bubbles to households where there is only adult in it.

Masks mandatory in queues for essential shops.

I doubt they will stop support bubbles since Boris has got one with his MIL

I say my dm is in our support bubble, but she also looks after our child. Hopefully she would be able to continue doing that just changing it to childcare bubble?She is social and childcare.

Curfews would be a major one - this would stop a lot of transmission with people not being allowed out past eg 8pm.

I think that they could, and probably should, do the following:

1. strengthen the WFH guidelines to ‘you must WFH if you can’, rather than ‘should’. Lots of employers not bothering this time. Be aggressive and proactive in encouraging companies to adopt home working, with possible sanctions if they don’t when they could.
2. hugely cut down on the amount of children eligible for school. The above should help with that. Again, make it clear to businesses that they have a duty to be as flexible as possible to help homeschooling parents.

1. Potentially temporarily suspend the curriculum again, to reduce pressure on working parents to homeschool and allow more children to stay at home.
2. Stop the exemption about walking with another person and their children under 5. We’ve used this in the past and it’s been great. But the children don’t SD and often the adults don’t too. People are also abusing it to meet with more than one person.
3. Potentially put the guidance about not travelling outside your local area unless necessary into law. Personally, I’m not sure that walking a 20 minute drive from your home actually increases the risk at all but all of the cars on the road seems to be hugely contributing to the feeling of ‘this isn’t a really lockdown’ and may well be affecting compliance accordingly.
4. Removing the exemptions for businesses about face to face indoor meetings for work purposes. There have been threads on here (including the woman with a husband going to a non essential course with 20 other people at a hotel) which show how this is being abused. Businesses will have to find a way to meet with clients virtually if it’s that important.
5. Stop face to face worship.
6. Stronger messaging (it’s already ramping up). Not so much of the ‘everyone’s trying to hard’ BS and a bit more realism. Adverts demonstrating what an overwhelmed NHS could mean to them and their families if they’re in an accident, have a heart attack or something. It’s possibly a bit fear-mongery but sadly seems to need to be done, as a lot of people aren’t scared of Covid any more and I think that a lot of the compliance in the spring was down to fear for selves / family as opposed to altruism.
7. cracking down on what is ‘essential retail’. Strongly encouraging shops to enforce mask wearing and only one person entering. Some children will have to shop with their parents, this is fine. However I think a security guard at the store front nicely asking why people aren’t on their own isn’t the worst thing in the world given the situation we’re in. I think it would cut down on those going in groups / with children who don’t have to.

Something that I really hope they don’t do unless there is solid data that it’s significantly driving up cases:

• close nurseries. I know it’s controversial and very difficult for nursery workers but I think nurseries should be one of the last things to go. From what I’ve seen they are not responsible for a high level of spread. Conversely, their closure in the past caused huge difficulties for children and parents, to the point of it being genuinely unsafe. However, government should support Early Years Settings to furlough their most vulnerable staff.

I hate that any more is necessary, it’s hard enough already. However, the numbers are so bleak I think there will be little choice. I just hope the decisions about what are made intelligently.

@strippedfridge Absolutely unfair to accuse hospitals of creating their own problem. If the government had acted swiftly enough to implement appropriate guidance and ALL people followed the rules consistently we wouldn't be in this mess.

We have learnt a lot in the NHS from wave 1 but are still constrained by our limited space, testing capacity, staffing and resources. We take pains to test patients on admission, on day 3, day 5 and day 7 and at any time they are symptomatic. Sometimes we miss asymptomatic or late presenting cases. When this happens we end up with contact bays which we cant admit into, and we have to be really careful when we move patients to other areas as we dont know which, if any contacts may become symptomatic and when. We have taken bed spaces out to facilitate distancing, which makes our bed pressures worse. Some patients are in and out on a day or two. Some, such as stroke patients or frail hip fracture cases may be weeks in hospital. We dont have enough side rooms to isolate people. Patients, like everyone else, have free will to move around or even outside the hospital if they wish and we have no rights to detain people or confine them to a bed space, we can only advise and encourage.

We try to maintain staff in bubbles, however some staff (medical, domestic and AHPs) move around wards/depts a lot. When we have staff shortages we move nursing staff more than we would like. We now have the capacity to test staff routinely (with all the failings of lateral flow you will be aware of) so we pick up asymptomatic staff and isolate them immediately.

I am really offended by your insinuations.
If you all do your jobs and stay the fuck at home, my teams will have more space to do ours.

Thanks

This is one of the softest "lockdowns" on earth so tightening up shouldn't be hard.

It's not even as hard as our first lockdown for a start.