Coronavirus General Discussion

Ah, sorry. I misunderstood. I'd been up since about 03:30 and wasn't at my best.

I agree we went into lockdown too late. I was saying so at the time, while the politicians were doing what they always do with scientific evidence and picking the end of the error bars that suits them and acting like that's the reality. But I don't think we've left lockdown too early because we haven't actually left it yet. It's been eased, not ended. Where I am you'd never know that anything has changed: people are still queueing two metres apart at the supermarket and still standing back to let others pass, the car park where I leave my car at home is still as empty all day as it usually is first thing on a Sunday morning, there's hardly any traffic around, and most shops are still shut. If I hadn't watched the news or come here I'd never have known there was any difference.

Yes, loads of idiots are flocking to crowded beaches, but let's not forget they were doing that every hot weekend. Idiots gonna idiot, and judging the behaviour of the entire population by what happens on a sunny beach is like doing a survey of people's hobbies on the top of Ben Nevis and concluding that the most popular leisure activity is mountain climbing.

What sort of slogan would you (or anyone else) suggest, then?

We can't remain in lockdown forever, and it would be ridiculous to force the entire country to follow the same rules as the most dangerous places on the assumption that everything must be completely safe before anything is permitted. There are some places where people can do things safely that would be dangerous elsewhere. (On the way home yesterday I saw a family sitting on the grass verge outside their house. Safe for them in a small village in the middle of nowhere; extremely inadvisable in a city.) At some point the government has to hand over responsibility for people's safety to the people themselves.

Slogans like "clunk click every trip" work because they apply to everyone all the time. The "stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives" was appropriate because it applied to everyone: the government needed to get the whole country shut down at once. But they can't reopen the whole country at once. It necessarily has to be done in stages as the risk decreases, with high-risk areas having more severe restrictions for longer. In that context, how can there be one slogan for everyone?

Another interesting intervention this time by the British Medical Journal (BMJ)


Covid-19: Questions of conscience and duty for scientific advisers

www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2102

Got a protest march under way. Came past about 45 mins ago - maybe 200 - winding through the estates and heading towards Brixton police station. Not too hard to keep distance on a march but things are likely to get intense later this afternoon.

All kinds of pent up emotions. Helicopter and sirens before 2.30 does not bode well.

One thing I hope is that people will now know diseases are caught from other people and react appropriately going forward. How often have we had colleagues who should’ve stayed at home coming into work and playing the hero card and the ones who don’t considered lightweights.

Finally got a reply to my now eight emails to my MP about Cummings. Came in the post, some copy and paste twaddle about it being 'regrettable' and how we 'must now concentrate on Coronavirus' AKA towing Boris' line of 'Move On'. Seen lots of posts on Twitter from various people having received the same letter. What a waste of resources, he could have stuck it in an email, never mind the fact it ignored almost all of the points I raised in my email. If he thinks I;m going to stop emailing he's got another thing coming!

Not only is it not surprising, it's entirely deliberate. As I said somewhere else, it's become clear that public safety is not this government's highest priority.

Public safety doesn't just relate to coronavirus though, and the government's job goes far beyond public safety. I'm not for one minute defending the Government, but I am genuinely astonished that people seem to think coronavirus is the only thing that matters or that the government should be allocating resources, time or importance to.

We can't possibly know that. All we know is that other 47 haven't publicly disagreed with the government's actions. That three have decided to publicly speak out against their employer's actions is worthy of note.

But I think people do get it. My experience is different from yours, in that I haven't seen many people acting any differently from a couple of weeks ago. When I see people standing in a queue for the supermarket all carefully spaced out they're certainly not doing it because they think the tape on the floor is a magical anti-virus force field. Similarly when people step off the pavement to pass someone else. When neighbours meet in the street and carefully keep well apart. When people wait to use a letter box until the person already at it moves away. Not everyone, by any means, but that was the case right from the start. Most people do seem to understand it.

But for some reason there are a few people here who seem to be convinced that the general public are dumb as a box of rocks and need a simple slogan or they'll all just rush out and forget everything that's happened, and I suspect that's motivated more by hatred of the government than any actual evidence that a significant number of people are confused. (To be fair, it's not exactly difficult to hate this government. If I wanted to post my opinion of Boris Johnson I'd have to disable the profanity filter.) I've tried several times to get people to explain why they think disease transmission is so hard to understand and mostly received insults in return, which I'm choosing to take as "we've got nothing".

As for masks, I agree that some clear advice would be useful. They certainly help in stopping infected people spread the disease and should probably be required on public transport. I'm surprised the beaches weren't closed, but I don't think the crowds were there as a result of confusion over the government's latest message because there have been crowds before. No matter what the government says there'll be simpletons who think it doesn't apply to them. Unfortunately some of them are in the government itself.

Personally I have enough faith in most people to be sensible that they'll do the right thing no matter what the government says. Right now I think that'll be enough. If it turns out it isn't then we're back in a full lockdown again.

For me the issue isn't whether the required and sensible measures are inherently easy to grasp. It's that the communication from the government seems to be making simple matters more complex and confusing than they need to be. I can't help but think the reason for this is so they can later blame us for not following their instructions to the letter. Although there is also now a clear element of trying to obfuscate the rules surrounding what Dominic Cummings did.