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.

Spain's uber strict lockdown worked so well didn't it? We should all aspire to stop our children breathing fresh air like they did because it was soooooo successful.

I think Spain went too far with some of those lockdown measures and then went too far the other way in opening up the country almost back to normal in the summer - encouraging mass tourism as well - until cases rose sharply again. They undid all that sacrifice with that stupidity.

@Sostenueto It won’t have any effect on her. She’s had her own brushes with death and just wants to be able to get on with life now.

COVID deniers should be fined.
Still parents refuse to wear masks at the school gates
Stand there laughing and gassing with no 2m distance

3 of them caught it last wk and one is in hospital- still sending their kids in (refuse to get them tested, no symptoms) and we can’t do anything about it as they said the magic words- key worker (one is a sahm but has told the head she just got a job in a special school- how do we prove otherwise- we know 100% she has not).

Not everyone can work from home. Only those with office based jobs or admin jobs that can be done from home. The rest mainly essential workers ( vast majority) cannot work from home. It is the majority we should be safeguarding and making sure they don't spread it. Those wfh since March and continuing to are the most protected workers in this country and essential workers the least.

@trappedsincesundaymorn

Everybody saying takeaway coffees should be banned please may I give you a different point of view? Today I shall be doing a 4 hour round trip in order to provide support for 2 different single adult households. It's my job and they have set hours of support contracted by local authorities for things such as admin, shopping, drs appointments issues with landlords etc, which, because they have mental health or issues or learning difficulties and other needs, they are not able to do themselves. My takeaway Costa at around 2pm this afternoon, which I shall have sitting alone in the car, will be my only hot drink today, until I get home at around 6pm.
You do know that you could make coffee at home and transport it in a flask which will keep it hot?

“ What about a 2-adult household with no children where one goes out to work and the other is furloughed or unemployed? They can't form a bubble yet the person at home is without adult company in the same way as someone with a child under 1 is.”

While I agree the lack of company would be awful and I would support ways to reduce that isolation, it is in no way the same as caring for a child under 1 at the same time. It just isn’t. If it were, we wouldn’t have maternity leave

Many people are having to go into an office because of a micro-managing boss (or worse) who can easily work from home completely or for the majority of the week. I would have offices closed for part of the week, apart from health, shopping, emergency services and utilities (and a few other defined exceptions), say only open Tuesday to Thursday.

I've not RTWT so apologies if this is repetition but I thought this post by Fireflissfrom the data thread made excellent points

yes you're right that the current lockdown is not as strict as in the spring. But we don't know that making it stricter would help - as a major factor behind the spread is almost certainly non-compliance. A stricter set of rules that, maybe a third of people follow, aren't going to work either. They'll just shaft the economy further and make life even harder for those who do follow the rules. There are also things we could do to reduce spread that don't involve a stricter lockdown - more testing, increasing isolation rules for families to 10 days from the time the last person catches it, vaccinating over 60s who work outside the home before retired 65-75 year olds, increasing sick pay, not allowing over 14s in to school even if their parents are keyworkers, offering hotel rooms to people who need to isolate from family members, etc, etc.

I just don't feel there's the public support behind ever tighter lockdown, and without support, it won't work

Those who advocate masks outside clearly don’t have to care for babies and toddlers. It’s hard enough in the few indoor spaces we have to go to, but it would make the outdoor trips we do to the park and the woods extremely difficult. I am sure some women would take it in their stride and “barely notice” the mask, so by all means include me amongst the feeble whiners, but it’s easy to just suggest this stuff when you only have to concentrate on yourself whilst out and about and aren’t trying to communicate with a toddler, have a baby in a carrier pulling your facemask down etc

Many things COULD be changed but Chris Whitty this morning asked us all to minimise contact ourselves. If we don't do this, my guess is that they will have to tighten up. There are many suggestions on this thread as to what they could do.

If you can't WFH and you aren't a key worker you should be furloughed

@User158340

Spain's uber strict lockdown worked so well didn't it? We should all aspire to stop our children breathing fresh air like they did because it was soooooo successful.

I think Spain went too far with some of those lockdown measures and then went too far the other way in opening up the country almost back to normal in the summer - encouraging mass tourism as well - until cases rose sharply again. They undid all that sacrifice with that stupidity.

I was in southern Spain in the middle of March last year and the tourist sites were crammed with busloads of Chinese tourists, even though it was already obvious covid was going to kick off.

Then Spain and Italy introduced the strictest lockdowns in Europe and their infection rates still kept going through the roof. It does seem that confining people to small apartments with shared ventilation systems, thin walls and overlooking balconies and restricting them from going outdoors in the sunshine is an infection risk in itself.

But these draconian lockdowns are very useful in preventing governments for being blamed for deaths.

@EmmanuelleMakro

Hartlepool council could close the car parks in Seaton Carew....Hords of visitors this weekend. I gave up walking my ddog and went home* Oh the irony! Complaining about other people being out when you were! Selfish, much? Stay at home yourself, why not?

Why irony? Presumably the poster was out walking her dog in her local area. I happen to live in a tourist area too; there shouldn’t be any tourists here at the moment because Stay at Home! Stretching ‘allowed to go outside to exercise’ to ‘drive to area of outstanding natural beauty, park up and buy takeaway coffee’ is taking the piss and demonstrates either a complete lack of understanding or utter contempt for the objective of the restrictions.

"There is an exemption for those in need of care. PND would qualify someone as needing care."

Although, part of the aim must be to avoid people developing PND (or other mental health conditions) in the first place.

Other possible measures;
*increase use of capacity in private hospitals (passing mention in the Times that capacity of large London private hospitals not fully contracted for by the NHS at the moment - don't know the details, but I would have thought they could make a significant contribution.)

• have the retired docs/nurses who registered last year to come back to work all been used as much as possible? (not the vaccinator list, that is a separate issue, but the 'return to workers')

*effective border control - not just a 72 beforehand test, but supervised quarantine in hotels - (unless the scientific evidence is that this is pointless, obviously).

Twitter comments this morning on 'that photo' - the beach one - and how long lense photography gives the impression that people are closer than they really are.

DIY (not essential. Close unless trade)

So what happens when a tap stops working, or something else needs replacing or repairing urgently? A lot of people can do things themselves which saves a tradesman coming into their home. Maybe make them click and collect only.

“ "There is an exemption for those in need of care. PND would qualify someone as needing care."

Although, part of the aim must be to avoid people developing PND (or other mental health conditions) in the first place. ”

Precisely. This is what under 1 bubbles are for - not just to support those who already have significant MH problems, but to avoid an unmanageable crisis of women’s MH and child safeguarding, which would also put a lot of pressure on the NHS.

They need to enforce more.

Where we live it's a joke.
I feel it's only us sticking to rules.
An example being my neighbour.
She is a carer. Husband a SE painter/decorator going to peoples homes. He has a bad dry cough. Mixing with god knows who, visitors to their house every other day.... I could go on.

Back in the day, MNers were sympathetic to the experience of women with babies. Now loads who have no experience of what it’s like to have a baby during a pandemic have all sorts of opinions about how women should be coping. I don’t have to homeschool and work at the same time, I don’t have teenagers with MH problems, I don’t live alone, and so on, and I don’t go around suggesting increasing restrictions for people in those categories

He has a bad dry cough

I have a dry cough. I've always had it as part of my hay fever, last year it continued and I've pin pointed it's down to stress, the more stressed I am the worse the cough. I still have to go out though.

I suspect the government will focus on things that they can actually enforce, such as closing other businesses, or police checks on motorways/major roads. With the best will in the world, the police can't enforce support bubbles or indeed illicit household mixing.

However, I also think that the more the government scream 'doom! doom! doom!' at us, the more a lot of people shut down and don't listen. We've had the 'the world is ending' message for nearly a year now and we're desensitised to it. The government cried wolf for too long, and now there really is a wolf, people don't believe them. I read something yesterday saying they think 1 in 5 now has or has had coronavirus. Well, unless most are asymptomatic, not in my local area - out of, say, 50 people I know of, only two have had a positive test.

It also looks to me from the daily cases and from the ZOE app as though we are approaching the peak of this wave. We haven't been locked down long enough to see the impact of restrictions on hospital cases/deaths but if the rate of growth is slowing, maybe these restrictions plus vaccinations are enough. They never seem to give these restrictions enough time to work before they add more.

Pinksparklycat I get that. But we don't know if it is just a cough.
It's the constant flow of visitors & couldn't give a toss attitude.

"We've had the 'the world is ending' message for nearly a year now and we're desensitised to it."

An interesting point. I wonder if it is something slightly different - people are protecting their mood/mental health by not reading/watching the news so much, or more likely reading it and mentally "shutting off". A "humankind cannot bear too much reality" type of thing.

What did Chris Whitty say this morning on the radio/tv programmes, does anyone know? I read a report on twitter that he said that running/walking quickly past someone outdoors is much less risky than, say, clustering outdoors.

Have to say that I completely agree with @bathsh3ba. Personally I’m at the point where I don’t watch live TV, seldom have the radio on and take the headlines in the media with a bucket of salt, preferring to look at the covid dashboard and NHS England for any information.

I’m completely past caring about all the doom and gloom, don’t believe a word that the government and Sage say and quite honestly would not comply with any more restrictions on my life.

The NHS has caused untold harm to several of my family members over the past few years so protecting it now leaves a very sour taste.