Government not following their own restrictions

[babymama471]

With the constant drip feeds of parties taking place at number 10 during the lockdown it is making me question of the tories were not as concerned by covid as they have led us to believe

I'm not trying to spread conspiracy theories but I can't quite get my head around it. They made the rules to lock us down, to stop our children from going to school, supposedly to save lives. So why did they all not give a second thought about mixing and partying? Were they not concerned about themselves/ their families?? Did they know something we don't??

They seem to have had a sense of security about the whole situation, partying without a seconds thought! Whereas we were crossing the road from our loved ones on our daily walk incase we were to infect them/ become infected.

It just doesn't make sense.

I

It just doesn't make any sense.

Anyone remember when the bar in Parliament was exempt from curfew?

london.eater.com/2020/9/28/21459522/parliament-bars-exempt-coronavirus-curfew-10pm-uk

Thought it was a farce from then on.

I wonder who the next muppet will be . Because fear not- the next one will be just as stupid.

In BJ’s defence, were these staff in a working bubble? Were they together anyway? What does it matter if there was a cake and bottle of Buck’s Fizz there? It’s in poor taste, but not sure if he broke the law.

Have you watched local council meetings online? Self important idiots- all of them.

@babymama471

With the constant drip feeds of parties taking place at number 10 during the lockdown it is making me question of the tories were not as concerned by covid as they have led us to believe

I'm not trying to spread conspiracy theories but I can't quite get my head around it. They made the rules to lock us down, to stop our children from going to school, supposedly to save lives. So why did they all not give a second thought about mixing and partying? Were they not concerned about themselves/ their families?? Did they know something we don't??

They seem to have had a sense of security about the whole situation, partying without a seconds thought! Whereas we were crossing the road from our loved ones on our daily walk incase we were to infect them/ become infected.

It just doesn't make sense.

I

It just doesn't make any sense.

Plenty of people understood that measures were needed but probably thought that their rule breaking didn’t matter as it was “only them”.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

A few things I think about this are:

1. While a lot of scare tactics were used they never lied about the actual personal risk to individuals. It was always clear from quite early on that most people would come through covid just fine, even if they were sick for a few weeks. That includes CEV people, to be clear. So any notion people had that they were at massively high risk was not based on any fact.

2. The government constantly makes rules that they would never follow/tolerate for themselves, but these are mostly targeted at poor people, people with disabilities, marginalised people and immigrants. It's interesting that the middle classes who are normally pandered to are now up in arms about something that happens to people with less power every day. Constant indignities and hypocrisies are heaped upon them and no one gives a shit.

3. When the government tried to ease restrictions or actually did ease restrictions there was a backlash. They were in a position of knowing a lot of the restrictions were pointless or damaging - that was why, for example, they tried to open schools in Jan 2021 - but there was a huge uproar and so they backed down. It was cowardly of them to do that but the impetus came from the same public who are now whinging.

Boris is a lying weasel, no doubt about it. But it was the WHO, the medical community, PHE, Van Tam and Whitty who drove the restrictions that people now realise were unnecessarily punitive and, in many cases, just ridiculous. The argument seems to be that Boris and his band of idiots should have followed the rules, when in fact what they should have done is said they weren't necessary. They didn't have the courage or integrity to say that, they just let the public police each other and did their own thing.

TBH I don't have much sympathy for people who are now looking back in anger. The time to realise it was all a farce was in May 2020, not now. It's too late. The pointless suffering has happened. Take it out on Boris, by all means, he's a turd, but maybe also take a look at why you didn't realise sooner what a waste of time it all was.

I dont think they were unnecessary actually.

They were necessary because we locked down too late.

Also we didn’t have vaccines back then. So it seems hard to remember what it was like without that protection.

We also didn’t have access to daily LFTs like we do now, which offer massive reassurance.

You only have to look at infection rates of school children who have no vaccines so see how it’s blazing through. If we had no vaccines, we’d be screwed.

So yes they were necessary but they were too late.

Some measures were silly - in respect of restrictions on outdoor meeting and only one trip of daily exercise being allowed.

But on the whole, yes they were needed sadly.

The 'we locked down too late' argument makes zero sense to me. Realistically how much earlier could we have locked down? What actual difference would it have made?

@TheDailyCarbunkle

The 'we locked down too late' argument makes zero sense to me. Realistically how much earlier could we have locked down? What actual difference would it have made?

Do you remember that those large scale events went ahead? All of those big super spreader events, when countries in Europe were doing the opposite?

I can’t say with any certainty what difference it would have made, but it felt very much like we locked down late, we gave up with testing and tracing too early, we didn’t control the borders when it came to covid.

Plenty of mistakes were made, as that Parliament report stated.

The Parliamentary committee report on covid is pretty sobering here

It’s worth reading even just the summary!

Lines such as

Even when the UK strategy did change dramatically in March 2020, it was because of domestic concern about the NHS being overwhelmed rather than a serious decision to follow emerging international best practice

So we didn’t follow best practices

And we basically gave up which meant lockdown was inevitable but was too late.

There was a desire to avoid a lockdown because of the immense harm it would entail to the economy, normal health services and society. In the absence of other strategies such as rigorous case isolation, a meaningful test and trace operation, and robust border controls, a full lockdown was inevitable and should have come sooner

I hope we’ve learnt lessons for the latter stages of this pandemic but I very much doubt it.

@tigermummy10

Anyone remember when the bar in Parliament was exempt from curfew?

london.eater.com/2020/9/28/21459522/parliament-bars-exempt-coronavirus-curfew-10pm-uk

Thought it was a farce from then on.

I believe the restaurant also remained open as a ‘works canteen’.

Which meant the MPs could continue to meet friends for three course lunches.

None of that really makes sense though - rigorous case isolation, meaningful test and trace and robust border controls work for a disease like Ebola, which has a very specific mode of transmission, very clear and distinct symptoms and tends to happen in local outbreaks. By the time anyone knew covid existed it was already all over Europe and already far too late to track cases. Add to that the fact that covid has very indistinct symptoms and is easily transmitted without direct contact and all those measures just don't work.

NZ managed to control covid for a (long) while because they had a lot of advance warning of its arrival due to its geographical location. But even they, after two years of control and vaccines, are now in a position of not being able to stop it spreading. So the argument that those measures work is patently false. The best they can do is delay things for a while.

Given the massive destruction and disruption locking people in their homes causes, it makes sense not to take that option as a first resort.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

None of that really makes sense though - rigorous case isolation, meaningful test and trace and robust border controls work for a disease like Ebola, which has a very specific mode of transmission, very clear and distinct symptoms and tends to happen in local outbreaks. By the time anyone knew covid existed it was already all over Europe and already far too late to track cases. Add to that the fact that covid has very indistinct symptoms and is easily transmitted without direct contact and all those measures just don't work.

NZ managed to control covid for a (long) while because they had a lot of advance warning of its arrival due to its geographical location. But even they, after two years of control and vaccines, are now in a position of not being able to stop it spreading. So the argument that those measures work is patently false. The best they can do is delay things for a while.

Given the massive destruction and disruption locking people in their homes causes, it makes sense not to take that option as a first resort.

It’s worth reading the report.

I remember how they just gave up - but actually if they’d used local public health officials on the ground when case numbers were lower back in Feb 2020, then who knows where we would have ended up.

Other countries (not Europe mind) managed it. We didn’t even try!

I suspect the biggest issue is that Europe just wasn’t used to dealing with these sorts of viruses whereas countries like South Korea were.

I don't think there was any country that managed to control covid without long term restrictions though was there?

The list of countries avoiding Covid is decreasing

NZ now has outbreaks etc

But overall what Daily has put re timing and borders makes sense to me

I think they didn’t care because they knew that they would be treated differently. They knew that police wouldn’t treat them as others so they wouldn’t lose their jobs and incomes for breaking rules.
They also hoped to get the best medical help and they did, Boris got not ONE personal nurse but TWO to turn him over. I suspected that my child wouldn’t get ANY due to her disability so I washed my hands, kept my distance from others and stayed at home.

By the way some of them were possibly quite scared for their life and health, e.g Priti Patel was almost invisible during the first lockdown, there were lots of comments about it. And no one mentioned so far her being at the parties.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

I don't think there was any country that managed to control covid without long term restrictions though was there?

We could have had a lower death rate and case rate. We’ve had too many changes in measures I think which probably hasn’t helped matters.

I have not seen any side by side comparison of restrictions/test and trace systems etc by country so I don’t know.

But I get the sense we kept lurching from one to the other.

By May 2020, Covid had passed through Downing Street, so there was some level of immunity.

Everyone was mixing in contact anyway and the culture seems to have a rather blurry distinction between work and socialising. Blagging/ self-deluding that it wasn't partying at all is easier under those circumstances.

Even a better-behaved government weren't and never could be in it with the rest of us. They were still substantially working relatively normally. The likes of Dom Cummings had spare houses in the family they could head off to isolate in. They weren't overcrowded living/working/teaching in small houses. They had staff to deal with childcare and cleaning. They didn't spend multiple months lacking meaningful contact with people beyond their household (as much as I would have loved to socialise, I couldn't find anyone with the time or inclination to do so before September)

There are some pretty humungous egos in Downing Street, and highly likely a lot of superiority complexes. They also knew that complience would not be 100% and were indeed surprised at continued high levels of complience beyond expectations.

From a Covid point of view these gatherings are of low importance. These people were mixing regardless and had already had the illness.
It matters as a point of hypocrisy. They knew the early outdoor gatherings were low risk. Why was outdoor socialising still banned, playgrounds still padlocked? Why have dying people ever been denied love and comfort? (this one is not all on the government and has often been imposed over-zealously by individual organisations) Why was it so slow to reopen society? Why did we waste naturally low rates in the summer when the population is healthier and topped up on vitamin D.
That one's not just on the British Government, other countries have repeated similar errors in 2021.

It matters as a point of hypocrisy.

Right. That's the only point that matters. Objectively, most of the rules were of questionable merit at best.

As TheDailyCarbunkle points out, they got stuck when it came to repealing the rules, for reasons that seem mainly down to them being surprised at their own success.

Instead of explaining the situation, and helping the country to unwind, they appear to have viewed the public as a bunch of unredeemable mugs, yet carried on themselves regardless. They were still substantially working relatively normally — in spades. At best, it's an "ah, we give up!" moment.

It's very understandable. But we should not accept after all we've been put through.

Other countries have repeated similar errors

It's true that it is a repeated pattern. But that doesn't make it okay.

It's only excusable to follow others without recourse if the data is basically undecidable.

The problem is they seem to followed the data, and come to quite a different conclusion. It's actually really good. Smart, even. But what's not okay is that they hung us out to dry.

The government constantly makes rules that they would never follow/tolerate for themselves, but these are mostly targeted at poor people, people with disabilities, marginalised people and immigrants. It's interesting that the middle classes who are normally pandered to are now up in arms about something that happens to people with less power every day. Constant indignities and hypocrisies are heaped upon them and no one gives a shit.

To further this point, the decision to respond to a public health with criminalization also made targeting of marginalised people inevitable too. It was always going to be the case that the covid regulations would be implemented in racist and classist ways. The state never exercises it power equally across all groups.

None of this is to remotely minimise the suffering of middle class people of all ethnicities too, particularly those of them who fell into the fuck off you're irrelevant groups such as children, working mothers, teachers in unventilated classrooms, clinical staff who weren't given proper PPE etc. But it's important to spell out that the approach our government took meant right from the start that marginalised groups were going to be disproportionately targeted.