If you think it's too soon for normal life to be resuming...

[TheVampiresWife]

...when do you think it won't be? What criteria would you like to see met?

I've seen lots of posts here saying that the trials going on in Liverpool/hospitality reopening/the pencilled-in end to restrictions in June and so on are all happening too soon. If your thinking is along these lines, why so - do you think we should be aiming for zero covid before things reopen fully? Or are variants your main worry? And if you do feel this way, will you continue to SD/stay home/not participate in large events etc beyond June?

My own thinking is that we're in a better position now than we've been since all this began - the majority of adults have had at least one vaccination (and vaccines have been proven to reduce transmission), rates are incredibly low or suppressed in many areas and over 60% of people have antibodies. But I'm interested to know why people may feel differently.

I would like to keep some of the less onerous aspects, such as mask wearing and socially distancing where possible indoors. Or increasing ventilation.

Maybe keeping the number of households you can meet indoors down or in a specific time..

Possibly issuing guidance on reducing transmission without making it law so people can get a choice and make decisions based on their circumstances.

Keep any screens that have been installed, hand gel use,

Thinking about the swimming, perhaps dual pricing, ordinary priced and triple cost socially distanced sessions.

Keeping ventilation in schools, mask wearing in corridors, encouraging more outdoor learning in primary, (more interesting for the kids)

Definitely revisit measures in September before a possible third wave in winter to see if top up vaccination is needed and analyse variants/ vaccinated percentages to see if any measures are needed.

I really do not want another lockdown and would rather a few continuing measures if that meant no school, shop and sport etc closures again.

I bloody hope this is the end of the need for not meeting inside.

Thinking about the swimming, perhaps dual pricing, ordinary priced and triple cost socially distanced sessions.

I think such a measure would really show just how many people are really concerned about their 'safety', as opposed to having more space to themselves for free. I suspect very few would avail of the ''socially distanced swim' if they had to pay 3 times the normal price for it.

I think increased pricing for social distancing is a great idea.

Normal prices for normal service.

That will focus the minds.

@TheKeatingFive

Not at all, I’m happy enough with minor mitigations. I have no problems (personally) with mask wearing, some degree of SD with strangers, and I think ventilation should be much higher on the agenda for everyone. Frequent testing is also a good thing.

However, shutting down society to the degree we have done and keeping people from their close family and friends is not a route we should ever go down again to my mind.

That first paragraph would put you firmly in the "unwilling to go back to normal" camp in some people's eyes. There are plenty of people for whom all of that is completely unacceptable and should stop immediately.

As for "viruses mutate, it's what they do" and statements like that by other posters - well "volcanoes erupt, it's what they do" is also true - just because something is normal doesn't mean it can't also be, at times, extremely dangerous! This whole pandemic is caused by a new mutation from an existing family of viruses.

To those of you who say this - you may not need to devote any time to thinking about flu mutations, so you think it doesn't really matter, but there are people all over the world who do that monitoring and worrying on your behalf, every year.

Mutations of covid are going to need to be watched in a similar way for a long time, and we can't just shrug our shoulders and assume it'll all be fine because flu mutates and we cope with that. We're constantly on the brink of not coping with flu mutations: that's why a flu pandemic was top of so many people's pandemic planning; that's why bird flu frightened so many people.

It's true that we're going to have to live with covid, just as we live with flu, but that doesn't mean that our "living with covid" will look exactly the same as our "living with flu", where most ordinary people never give it a second thought or bother to care whether they might be spreading it.

Covid is still a new disease - we don't even yet properly understand what it does to the human body. As a society, we would be mad not to take the best precautions we can with it still, even long after we've moved on from the extreme ones like lockdown.

We could actually make ourselves, as a nation, one of the best at keeping a lid on covid levels, by all cooperating to maximise ventilation and space and things like masks wherever we can and the social and economic cost isn't too great, even when there are no formal laws or guidelines saying we must. Tiny decisions multiplied over millions of people could make a real difference.

Someone might plan to hug their family ASAP, but also be the best out of all their friends at always having car windows open when ferrying groups of kids around. Someone else might decide to sit close to their friends at the pub but continue with the habit of staying a couple of metres back from people they interact with for other reasons, and always empty and ventilate their house when having tradespeople in. Some people might decide to keep having as many get togethers as possible outdoors even when indoors is legal. All those small things are our safety net as we go forward - they might be optional (eventually) and each individual one might not make much difference, but multiplied over millions of people they will.

It's true that we're going to have to live with covid, just as we live with flu, but that doesn't mean that our "living with covid" will look exactly the same as our "living with flu", where most ordinary people never give it a second thought or bother to care whether they might be spreading it.

Our Covid vaccines are much more effective than our flu vaccines, and our vaccination programme has been much more comprehensive, so yes, it probably will mean that.

Some people will keep some habits for a while. But here's what I think will most likely happen: The person who is always 'the best out of all their friends at having car windows open' will do it for a while, then get to winter and get rained on a few times and get fed up of whinging wet children in the back and decide it's not worth it. The person who stays a few meters back from people they interact with will find it a very hard habit to remember to do - because it is not how we usually interact - and find it awkward to keep stepping backwards when other people get closer to them, and gradually stop doing it. And when they remember, they'll think: ah well, everyone's vaccinated anyway.

This is what we've done with every other infectious disease that was once new and dangerous. Flu, measles, TB. We know flu pandemics could be devastating, but we don't live our lives at a cautious distance from each other just in case some undetected human-transmissible strain of bird flu is spreading. It's going to take a lot more than the threat of a potential variant that doesn't yet exist to make people change social habits en masse forever.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing. I'm not saying we'll never get to that point where we're all vaccinated and don't have to think about it ourselves - just that for the immediate future we (ordinary people) are not going to be able to ignore it as much as we can flu (or as we do flu, whether or not we should).

And of course people doing those things to be careful will not like it at times and might not always do it (like when it's raining). And gradually over time things like that will reduce. But right now, for the rest of this year, and so long as new cases are coming into the country from the unvaccinated rest of the world and new variants are a risk, it will still help if we do these things. I don't understand why you would apparently prefer it if they didn't and prefer to argue against the idea. How does it harm you if lots of people take precautions you don't want to? It might actually help you by creating a safer background environment for you to be personally less cautious in.

As for "viruses mutate, it's what they do" and statements like that by other posters - well "volcanoes erupt, it's what they do" is also true - just because something is normal doesn't mean it can't also be, at times, extremely dangerous! This whole pandemic is caused by a new mutation from an existing family of viruses.

That's not correct. SARS Cov 2 is not a 'mutation'. It's an entirely new virus.

To those of you who say this - you may not need to devote any time to thinking about flu mutations, so you think it doesn't really matter, but there are people all over the world who do that monitoring and worrying on your behalf, every year.

And I'm happy for the experts to continue doing that. It doesn't mean I'm going to be living in fear of the next 'mutation' the media wants to hype up.

It's true that we're going to have to live with covid, just as we live with flu, but that doesn't mean that our "living with covid" will look exactly the same as our "living with flu", where most ordinary people never give it a second thought or bother to care whether they might be spreading it.

Why not? Covid is not an especially virulent disease, and we have vaccines which work remarkably well. Several months or maybe a year from now, assuming no major developments, why would we still be living in fear of Covid?

You say 'for the immediate future', then 'for the rest of this year', then 'so long as new cases are coming into the country from the unvaccinated rest of the world and new variants are a risk'. Those are different time periods, and the third one is, effectively, 'indefinitely'. There are always going to be unvaccinated people in the rest of the world. There is always going to be a 'risk' of new variants, if by that you mean 'there could, potentially, be a new variant that could, potentially, be better at evading vaccines that previous variants'.

I don't understand why you would apparently prefer it if they didn't and prefer to argue against the idea.

I'm not saying anything about whether or not it should happen. I don't remotely care if other people want to drive around with their car windows open in the rain. I'm saying that it won't happen, because it hasn't happened before with any other infectious disease and it's hard to see why we'd treat this one - the one we are lucky enough to have highly effective vaccines for, freely available for all adults and distributed by a competent national health service! - as an exception.

Before Covid, did you feel tempted to take any of these measures because there might potentially be a new strain of measles? If someone had suggested them to you, would you think "yep, that sounds reasonable"? Or would you have shrugged them off as a ridiculous overreaction you couldn't be faffed with, because your brain had filed 'measles' under 'not a threat, we have vaccines'? That's the place most people here will end up, mentally, with Covid too.

Several months or maybe a year from now, assuming no major developments, why would we still be living in fear of Covid?

If we want there to be "no major developments", it would be worth us all continuing to be careful and not acting as though covid no longer exists until we actually are all vaccinated. That would be the point of continuing to take optional low-cost distancing and ventilation measures - to get us to that point. We're not there yet.

We have power, collectively, through millions of tiny individual actions, to keep covid as as low a threat as possible. Millions of people giving up every precaution at once too early will have the opposite effect.

until we actually are all vaccinated

July, then?

@eeeyoresmiles

Several months or maybe a year from now, assuming no major developments, why would we still be living in fear of Covid?

If we want there to be "no major developments", it would be worth us all continuing to be careful and not acting as though covid no longer exists until we actually are all vaccinated. That would be the point of continuing to take optional low-cost distancing and ventilation measures - to get us to that point. We're not there yet.

We have power, collectively, through millions of tiny individual actions, to keep covid as as low a threat as possible. Millions of people giving up every precaution at once too early will have the opposite effect.

We're never 'all' going to be vaccinated. Even in a pro-vaccine country with an efficient healthcare system like Britain, there will always be a significant minority who either cannot or will not take the vaccine. Not to mention there are vast swathes of the world where access to vaccinations is difficult because of poor infrastructure and healthcare provision. So if you're waiting for 'everyone' to be vaccinated so as to exclude the possibility of 'variants' you're going to be waiting for an awful long time.

That said, there's absolutely nothing stopping you being as careful as you wish and taking whatever precautions you see fit. However. once restrictions are lifted, the vast majority of people are going to want to get back to normal as soon as possible. This has gone on more than long enough at this stage.

@eeeyoresmiles

So people who 'choose' to do these things will be seen as saintly and good and putting others' needs before their own, while those who don't - often because they can't, for example in the case of mask exempt people, or those with no outside space in which to socialise - will be seen as selfish and ignorant. No thank you.

And it's very, very unlikely we'll all be vaccinated. There will be a sizable minority who can't or won't. Not that it matters - vaccinations don't need to be taken up by everyone, just the majority, in order to be effective.

Oh and Covid 19 isn't a mutation, it's a new disease - hence the uncertainty about how it would play out, and the need to develop new vaccines from scratch.

Before Covid, did you feel tempted to take any of these measures because there might potentially be a new strain of measles? If someone had suggested them to you, would you think "yep, that sounds reasonable"? Or would you have shrugged them off as a ridiculous overreaction you couldn't be faffed with, because your brain had filed 'measles' under 'not a threat, we have vaccines'? That's the place most people here will end up, mentally, with Covid too.

We're not yet at that point with covid (and measles mutates less, too). So no, I wouldn't do that with measles, and I expect one day not to with covid, but I see the current situation as more fragile than you do. You seem to think we're home and dry, I don't think we are yet. And with any of those existing diseases, if public health advice at any point was to be careful and take extra precautions, I would go with that - and that too is where we are with covid, but aren't with measles.

It’s a mutation of a slightly earlier virus that probably just made bats sneeze a bit. So yes it’s a new mutation, but not a new mutation of a virus that we were watching/worried about/troubled by in the first place (unless you’re a bat in which case it was probably annoying).

You seem to think we're home and dry, I don't think we are yet.

I don’t think we are home and dry, but it is difficult to picture a more effective route to get there than widely available, highly effective vaccines. Once we’ve rolled those out, we are about as home and dry as we’re going to get.

@GoldenOmber

It’s a mutation of a slightly earlier virus that probably just made bats sneeze a bit. So yes it’s a new mutation, but not a new mutation of a virus that we were watching/worried about/troubled by in the first place (unless you’re a bat in which case it was probably annoying).

No, it's not a 'mutation'. It's a virus which has probably existed for a long time which recently made the 'leap' from (probably) bats to humans, perhaps via an intermediary host.

So people who 'choose' to do these things will be seen as saintly and good and putting others' needs before their own, while those who don't - often because they can't, for example in the case of mask exempt people, or those with no outside space in which to socialise - will be seen as selfish and ignorant. No thank you.

No, that isn't how I would see it. That's why the examples I gave had people doing both family hugging and more cautious things. The idea that there are types of people who are careful and ones who aren't is what I think we need to move on from. The way I see it, moving on from now we will all do better if we are still cautious at least some of the time, not none of the time, for a while yet. That's all I'm saying.

No, it's not a 'mutation'. It's a virus which has probably existed for a long time which recently made the 'leap' from (probably) bats to humans, perhaps via an intermediary host.

It is a ‘mutation’ of an earlier virus, just like every other virus. That’s how they evolve. It’s probably existed for under 100 years, because we can track back when it diverged from its closest relatives.

Q) What's better now than the autumn/winter of 2020/21 where the peak was allowed to build so large that 80,000 British people died, and most of us were in restrictions most of the time?

A) 23.4% of the U.K. population I has had two doses of vaccine. 51.9 has had the first dose. Some surge testing. Easier availability of tests.

Q) What is the same?

A) B117. The U.K. variant is still here and it's still dominant.

Q) And what is worse now?

A) The other variants that are also here, General fatigue with restrictions after more than a year of this shit. The pandemic worldwide is accelerating not slowing down, and the latest variants of concern demonstrate no sign of covid becoming less dangerous.