R shot up only during two events. Schools opening and Universities opening, and you can see this clearly on this graph someone else linked:

https://reproduction.live/world/GB

I can understand schools opening, but the devastating double peak when universities opened (Freshers week and then the 2nd/3rd years the week after) was totally avoidable.

There is minor peak at the end of August, but that is in my opinion actually holiday makers returning from infection ravaged Spain, as otherwise it would have been a month long peak.

Because of the UK's testing policies around only testing symptomatic individuals, it's very difficult to answer questions like this effectively.

See here for example, where it suggests that restaurants are one of the highest risk activities: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3

The main problem in the "Western approach" to the pandemy has been the logic: The effect has not been rigorously proven ⇒ The effect does not exist.

All your inputs are uncertain information to varying degrees, yet you still have to decide something. And the correct strategy is not to sit put and decide nothing.

http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/trisha-greenhalgh-wil...

There's a great article on the BBC news homepage fighting this effect now about Vitamin D.

The TL;DR is the government says "Vitamin D cannot be said to help coronavirus infections, but we strongly recommend everyone take vitamin D supplements, and it's so important we'll even give them out for free"

Bullshit.

If you want to play with simulations that clearly do not reflect real life, go ahead, but to me the Real World data is presently showing opening unis killed 10,000s people.

And it makes sense too. Eat out to help out you stayed in your local area. The time periods were short, often outside, and many of the people mixing were already exposed to each other.

Opening universities meant 100,000s of people moved around the country, met in big groups during induction, lots of mixing of new geographic regions. The time periods were long, often inside, and all the people mixing had never been exposed to each other.

We know that this happens every year, so we knew that it would happen this year too.

And not a single newspaper is reporting about it. The media should be shouting from the rooftops day after day that the 2nd wave was caused entirely by universities reopening and yet instead they regurgitate these releases from ONS blindly.

We could have reopened schools and accepted the small increase in actual cases, kept unis online only. But by reopening schools and universities, with the two events so close to each other they compounded and caused the 2nd wave.

As a small ray of hope, I know people who work in both the unis here in Notts and they're taking it very seriously and doing mass testing before they send them home, as well as staggering them being sent back. Hopefully other unis are too.

I've heard that one of the reasons Notts infection rate shot up so high compared to nationwide is because Nottingham University were aggressively contact testing with their own labs and found many more asymptomatic cases than the national government's shambolic track and trace system is presently achieving.

I'm not sure of the exact figures, I think Nottingham Uni has like 45k students and Nottingham Trent has about 25k.

The other thing is that the official "Nottingham City" boundary is actually quite small and has only 320k residents and I'd happily bet at least £50 that the official government figures don't include the students as residents which is why Nottingham has such a high "cases per 100,000" because the true population count is something like 25% higher than the the "official" one, artificially inflating the proportional cases count.

"From 3 December to 9 December, which will be known as the ‘student travel window’, students will be allowed to travel home on staggered departure dates set by universities, who will work with other institutions in the region to manage pressure on transport infrastructure.

The student travel window will mean students can travel having just completed the four-week period of national restrictions, reducing the risk of transmission to family and friends at home.

Universities should move learning online by 9 December so students can continue their education while also having the option to return home to study from there."

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/christmasguidance-set-out...

I know because I'm in it.

And this is the most recent set of data : https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

isn't this alternatively of a case of holiday makers infecting each others in droves while vacationing in all the same places in Spain?

R was lower in Spain in July and August than in the UK.

> Eligible establishments are those in which food is sold for immediate on-premises consumption.

...

> The discount cannot be applied to the following items:

> ...

> * food or drink that is to be consumed off premises

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/get-more-informat...

(Not comparing the two diseases, but wondering where grim Covid attitudes will persist)

Counted like COVID19 there are only about 15 000 who die from Seasonal Flu in the US. Compare that to the 250 000 or so dead despite massive efforts to contain COVID19.

For a start, Covid-19 testing is much more widespread than flu testing. The UK has been testing everyone hospitalized for any reason for Covid, which they don't do for flu, and I think other Western countries are broadly similar. The flu tests are also less sensitive. Not only that, but because flu tends to kill more via secondary bacterial pneumonia, apparently patients don't necessarily have enough influenza virus left to test positive by the time they're hospitalized, whereas Covid causes pneumonia directly. Also, there's strong statistical evidence that flu causes heart attacks which aren't recorded as influenza deaths on things like death certificates.

The headline CDC, etc stats take all this into account to estimate the number of people who died as a result of flu, in the sense that they'd have lived if they weren't infected. The "counted like Covid-19" stats generally don't count these as flu deaths, whilst comparing with stats that count almost anyone who died after being infected with Covid-19 as a Covid-19 death regardless of whether it was directly caused by Covid in this sense. They really don't compare like with like.

Yes, the same regime that notoriously made the UK a sick joke around the world after openly announcing its preferred strategy of infecting as much of the population as possible with a deadly plague.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-for-soci...

Trying to protect waiters/esses jobs, maybe?

Though pjc50’s comment looks pretty convincing given gov.uk could have used the same money to make it easier for businesses to restructure to offer delivery...

We just had an outbreak in halifax and bars and restaurants have far and away been the driver.

https://fortune.com/2020/06/26/is-it-safe-restaurant-coronav...

This is a hugely different from just "restaurants", for many reasons:

- restaurants have wait staff, so the guests are much more stationary, whereas in bars every round requires a walking trip to the bar for at least one person per group.

- restaurants have tables, and the guests are usually seated, whereas bars have much more people standing around and close together.

- as a result, the people walking around in restaurants can be controlled and trained, since they are employees. In bars, the people walking around are guests.

- restaurants are a quiet atmosphere, and people at the same tables can usually have an easy conversation. In most bars, there's music blaring at loud volume so people must lean in towards each other for every sentence.

I don't see how you go from "bars and restaurants have far and away been the driver" to "restaurants are one of the highest risk places" with a straight face. Can you point to studies showing how these differences don't make a diffference?

Restaurants are not usually a quiet atmosphere, at least in north america. This loud volume gets people talking more loudly. Animated talking is common in restaurants: people go to socialize, not to quietly.

Bars are worse, but lack of masks in restaurants make them much riskier than masked activities. What places would you estimate are riskier than restaurants?

I’ll grant that bars are #1, but restaurants havw got to be #5 or so. (I’m assuming also that high risk things like choirs are shut down. If not then that changes assumptions a bit)

https://ny.eater.com/2018/6/6/17429648/steve-cuozzo-noisy-re...

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/28/why-euro... (paywalled, key graphic is this: https://i.imgur.com/JpmZtPk.jpeg )

20%+ of secondary school kids absent (isolating, ill, or being kept away), but they still stubbornly insist on keeping them open.