@2bazookas
Nice attempt at selective editing.
Here is the full quote
Sir Patrick Vallance: Outdoors is absolutely lower risk than indoors, but it is not zero risk, as Chris said. It depends on what you do outdoors. Clearly, people in very close physical contact outdoors, people passing things around, where you can transmit from hand to implement to hand to face is not zero risk. It is not zero risk, but it is definitely lower risk than indoors. That has been something that we have been concerned about right from the very beginning.
Right at the beginning, our concern was indoors spread. Particularly in closed environments with lots of people and poor ventilation, the ability to spread easily in pubs and other things was a concern right at the beginning, much more so than outdoor gatherings. It remains the case that outdoor looks like lower risk. That is why opening up outdoors is coming before opening up indoors and is the order we would agree with. When levels are very high, clearly you have a risk of transmission, and as levels come down the risk of transmission outdoors goes down even further. That is where we are. I agree that it is much lower. I do not think it is zero, but it is a lower risk.
Q2240 Graham Stringer: Saying it is not zero is something we can all agree on. There is nothing in life that is zero risk. The empirical evidence when there have been crowded beaches is that there is no spike; there is no evidence that it has led in those areas to increased infection. Yet there are consequences to people’s civil liberties and to their health of not allowing them to go into parks and on to beaches. If I can repeat the second part of the question, what is the scientific basis of the rule of six?
Sir Patrick Vallance: We have said previously that the rule of six does not have some scientific absolutism to it. It is a policy decision based on minimising the number of people interacting. That is the case. The more people you have interacting, the higher the chance of there being some spread.
I reiterate that our view has always been—it is clear in the SAGE papers—that outdoors is much lower risk than indoors, but it is not completely risk free. It is the case that it is difficult to see how things like large beach gatherings and so on can cause a spike. The same was the case in a protest march in New York; they did not really see any spikes after that. It is lower risk, but the other thing that can happen with outdoor events, and so on, is that, when indoor things are also open, you start to get people congregating indoors around that. That can increase risk, but outdoors itself is lower risk. Chris, do you want to add to that?
Professor Whitty: No, I completely agree.