For some reason we can manage to prevent drunk agro people entering a club with the wrong shoes, but 8 months into a pandemic we can’t make people wear a bloody mask? It’s insane.
The government are partly to blame for making rules so haphazardly that even someone like me who reads EVERYTHING and wants to do the right thing 100% of the time finds them hard to be sure of.
But ultimately people have to start taking the blame for not even doing the basics or following the letter of the law but not the spirit - nose slingers are the prime example of this.
I’ve just decided to go my own much more stringent path and ignore dumb government advice.
At least in the US, dress codes in nightclubs exist as a deterrent to individuals with gang affiliations. It's pretty racist.
Guess which race anti-maskers are predominantly.
Where masks are not worn here is in smaller family owned businesses. Some have notices requiring masks on the door, some (many) do not, even though it's a state mandate.
Since this is the US, we have no public transport so I can't comment on that.
Outdoor mask use is limited (50%?) but at least quite sparse and distant (it's pretty cold, and wet, and everyone drives anyways.) Indoors the numbers are much higher (I'm guessing at least 90%), including for smaller businesses. I'm trying to think of a single business around here (small or large) without at least a sign saying you need to mask up before entry, and I'm drawing a blank. Several have soap dispensers too, and haphazard plexiglass sheets to help physically separate staff from customers.
Food is strictly delivery and take-out. Even when dine-in was still AFAIK legal, some places had it already voluntarilly closed off anyways.
Compliance is very high (>95%?), but the people who do not comply are basically the same people who were problems in the Before Times: belligerent, mentally ill, or both. The drivers almost always let them get away with it, again just as in the Before Times, probably because it's a risk to even interact with these people. I, for one, try very hard not to make eye contact with them or even look in their general direction; treating them like the Bugblatter Beast of Traal is at least moderately effective.
I do wish they wouldn't flash the stupid "Masks Required" on the route signs so often, though. It makes it a lot harder to tell which bus is actually arriving. And showing it on the route indicator on the _back_ of the coach is just spiteful.
Or maybe they're one of 12,943 medical and public health scientists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration [0].
> Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold.
Wearing a mask seems like a simple hygine measure to me.
Perhaps a signator might not wear a mask as a measure of protest against government "overreach", disregarding that part of the declaration, disregarding the law, and disregarding the risk of their actions to the health of their fellow citizens.
That last bit seems rather hostile. Rather belligerent. So I think we're right back to square one.
There are reasonable discussions and lawsuits to be had about how far is too far, and what reasonable public policy looks like. Even arguing on the internet sounds more productive to me than not wearing a mask as "protest" though.
I don't know, I'd like to call this Angevin idiocy or something. But yeah, Europe does have its fair share of covidiots too.
What do you mean you have no public transport? Is it cancelled because of covid?
Also: younger kids are ferried back and forth to school in special yellow busses that are only used for school service. So actually there _is_ a widespread public transport service all over the US but people don't think of it as such because it's run by the schools and only usable by school kids. Some companies run their own busses too for their workers, to and from the plant, to suit shift hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#Un...
(typically with subsidies or other provisions for paratransit)
1) you wouldn’t (shouldn’t?) go around with your dick hanging out of your trousers, so why would you do the same with your nose and your mask
2) you’re a dick if you do this
In the UK if someone is on the street and needs a place to stay there are shelters in every town. Nationally there are about 4,000 people that sleep rough, although most of the people that do suffer from addiction or mental illness. Many choose not to go to shelters because you have to be sober to stay in them.
To use a local(ish) example to me, Multnomah County in Oregon has about 815K people, and 3800 that are either living on the streets, in a shelter, or in temporary housing. That's 0.4%. Portland is known for having a homeless problem.
where? my counter-anecdote is I've taken to counting everyone on the carriage I'm on (between zone 2 and 1), and it's never more than 2-3 people without a mask, something like 90-95% compliance (seems down from a few months ago, though). in supermarkets it seems higher than that, to the extent I was quite weirded out to see a single person not wearing a mask last week.
And of course on the rare occasion a staff member challenges someone not wearing a mask, they claim they're exempt and don't have to provide any proof.
And I've had a friend who wanted to beat the travel restrictions by leaving London before midnight. That's rule beating.
I see it everywhere.
A PSA because it's important: I can promise future you would rather remember "dang, do you remember that shit Christmas we had to stay home?" over "dang, do you remember that shit Christmas that someone accidentally gave Mum covid and she died because we REALLY wanted Christmas with the family in the middle of a pandemic". It really isn't worth it. Not right now. Just be patient and wait.
The biggest lie is that if you're under 30 you're immune. You're not - not even slightly. You're far less likely to die than someone who is 85 and obese with diabetes and high blood pressure. But no one knows what the long term health implications are for younger people who make a partial recovery. And there's been a non-negligible number of those.
This is why the idea of chasing herd immunity without a vaccine has always been misguided
Regarding your PSA: In the mean time Taiwan has not had a quarantine at all, and has been free of (internal) Covid for over 200 days. Other SE-Asian countries are all doing very well, Japan for example does not have quarantine either.
European lock-down policies have been a monumental failure. Not good enough to stop the spread. But ruining the economy (and everybody's fun). It is truly remarkable that Europeans agree with being locked away for nearly one year now with little to show for, while other societies achieve much better results with different, and less drastic measures. No curiosity at all, it seems, even to understand why Taiwan, Japan and other countries succeed! SMH
I think it's less because the disease doesn't affect them, and more because the restrictions do. If you're living as a family unit then restrictions are tough, but it's something else entirely if you're a single person living alone (or with people you don't like).
Indeed I've seen a similar attitude (although perhaps less actual rule breaking) from at-risk old people saying damn the rules, they'd like to see their relatives.
Not that I think this excuses it.
European lock-down policies have been a monumental failure. Not good enough to stop the spread. But ruining the economy (and everybody's fun). It is truly remarkable that Europeans agree with being locked away for nearly one year now with little to show for, while other societies achieve much better results with different, and less drastic measures. No curiosity at all, it seems, even to understand why Taiwan, Japan and other countries succeed! SMH
The point about test and trace plus limited lockdowns is that you can play whack-a-mole with clusters, which does a far better job of preventing transmission than anything short of a vaccine.
Countries with aggressive test and trace and compulsory self-isolation have done best of all - and with limited economic damage.
None of this should be rocket science, but apparently it's not a priority for the UK government which has literally used a deadly pandemic as an excuse to hand out billions of pounds of public cash to mates, cronies, and party donors. With no expectation of any effective service provision in return.
Literally. That is not exaggeration in any way. It's on the record - including some court records - that the UK gov has been doing this.
aggressive test and trace
compulsory self-isolation
An interesting question is why that has not been possible in European countries. A high-ranking politician of my acquaintance stated privately, and very clearly, that it was exaggerated concern for privacy (of a population that has no concern using the products of Facebook, Google and similar trackers, not to mention mobile phones), stoked by a "privacy maffia", made meaningful test and trace (along the lines of Taiwan and other SE Asian states) political suicide, which is why him and others, despite knowing better, did not bother floating this.
I don't live in the UK, just explaining how I read this comment.
Masks are effortless, but there is also a lot of reason to believe they are not nearly as effective as was sold to people in the early summer.
At some point we get into "just wear a crucifix to ward off the Devil" territory of superstition.
Masks are obviously helpful at preventing transmission of some illnesses, but I've seen enough evidence that Coronavirus spreads via aerosol to not really trust the things.
Mayeb you can post some (preferably peer-reviewed) literature links that show "a lot of reason" to believe this.
> Limitation: Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others.
> The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use. The data were compatible with lesser degrees of self-protection.
I don't think any public health experts are saying "wear a mask and you'll be safe", they're saying "if everybody wears a mask, that will slow the infection rate". A study of a community with "uncommon general mask use" does not dispute this.
Finally, I don't think it's clear that a randomized controlled trial is the best method to answer this question. Aside from ethical concerns, you can't give someone a placebo mask. Shouldn't we assume that people will behave differently when they're wearing a mask?
"Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."
The points you are raising about limitations in no way affect the conclusion of the work. Short of putting infected people in a room with uninfected people, there is no ethical way to test the hypothesis that "masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others".
But since it's pretty unlikely that masks are effective in one direction only, this is the highest-quality evidence we have that they have no effect in one of the two directions.
> Finally, I don't think it's clear that a randomized controlled trial is the best method to answer this question.
A randomized controlled trial is always the gold standard for an intervention of this sort. But yeah, you can't do one for that hypothesis. So you're stuck with something that is fundamentally un-falsifiable. The best you can do is try to do what people have done so far: look at populations, and see if mask mandates make any difference, or ask people who caught Covid if they wore masks, or do similar things within families.
This is called retrospective cohort analysis, and it is low-quality evidence, at best.
> Aside from ethical concerns, you can't give someone a placebo mask. Shouldn't we assume that people will behave differently when they're wearing a mask?
Yes, we should assume that this might happen. It could well be true that wearing a mask makes people be more careless about distancing, for example. This is called "risk compensation", and is a well-known phenomenon in public health.
1. do masks inhibit production of and exposure to aerosols carrying SARS-COV-2? This seems (to me) to me clearly established, and essentially irrefutable.
2. do mask mandates reduce the spread of COVID19? this is an entirely different question, and has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the abilities of masks referenced in (1) above.
Aerosols? It's far from established. In fact, it's a dubious claim, unless you're far more specific about what you mean by "masks". The best laboratory studies show that properly fitted respirators (i.e. as used in hospitals), can reduce aerosol emissions. But few people are wearing respirators, and essentially nobody is fitting them correctly.
Cloth masks? Surgical masks? Cup masks? About the only claim you can make is that they might reduce heavy droplets and then, only by about 30% or so. There's no reason to believe they have any effect on aerosol emission.
Michael Osterholm covered this extensively:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/specia...
Anyone who has done a mask fitting -- where they put you in a room with vaporized stuff that you can taste to detect leaks -- will tell you how difficult it is to get an aerosol-resistant seal on a mask. The chances that the general public is doing it is 0%.
---------------
Data regarding the “real-world” effectiveness of community masking are limited to observational and epidemiological studies.
* An investigation of a high-exposure event, in which 2 symptomatically ill hair stylists interacted for an average of 15 minutes with each of 139 clients during an 8-day period, found that none of the 67 clients who subsequently consented to an interview and testing developed infection. The stylists and all clients universally wore masks in the salon as required by local ordinance and company policy at the time.
* In a study of 124 Beijing households with > 1 laboratory-confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 infection, mask use by the index patient and family contacts before the index patient developed symptoms reduced secondary transmission within the households by 79%.
* A retrospective case-control study from Thailand documented that, among more than 1,000 persons interviewed as part of contact tracing investigations, those who reported having always worn a mask during high-risk exposures experienced a greater than 70% reduced risk of acquiring infection compared with persons who did not wear masks under these circumstances.
* A study of an outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an environment notable for congregate living quarters and close working environments, found that use of face coverings on-board was associated with a 70% reduced risk.
* Investigations involving infected passengers aboard flights longer than 10 hours strongly suggest that masking prevented in-flight transmissions, as demonstrated by the absence of infection developing in other passengers and crew in the 14 days following exposure.
------------
Taken from: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/masking-scien...
All of these studies were conducted on data from the spring, when cases were declining across the northern hemisphere. How are these places doing now?
DC: up dramatically
https://covid-19.direct/metro/DC
Canada: all-time highs
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/canada/
Germany: all-time highs
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
US nationally: all-time highs
California: all-time highs
https://covid-19.direct/state/CA
New York: up dramatically
https://covid-19.direct/state/NY
Boston (where the "unified hospital system" was located): near all-time highs
https://covid-19.direct/metro/Boston
I could go on.
Anyone who attempted to conduct a similar analysis today would have to credibly conclude that masks have no protective effect whatsoever. But who knows...maybe they slightly alter the slope of the curve. It's impossible to tell without a controlled trial.
The german paper is particularly ironic, given that it was published approximately concurrently with a huge increase in diagnosed cases in the same city, which is now at all-time highs for the year:
Absolutely not the case. It would be just as credible, as has been noted by others in the comments here, to suggest that the major cause of spread is unmasked private gatherings.
> But who knows...maybe they slightly alter the slope of the curve. It's impossible to tell without a controlled trial.
I agree that without controlled trials, it is very difficult to tell definitively. That does not, however, translate into "there are lots of reasons to doubt ..."
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
Infection with SARS-CoV-2 occurred in 42 participants recommended masks (1.8%) and 53 control participants (2.1%). The between-group difference was −0.3 percentage point (95% CI, −1.2 to 0.4 percentage point; P = 0.38) (odds ratio, 0.82 [CI, 0.54 to 1.23]; P = 0.33). Multiple imputation accounting for loss to follow-up yielded similar results. Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.
“ Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.”
Also, I quoted this exact line in a comment below, so I'm not sure how you can credibly claim that I'm "mis-representing" something.
Imagine you are standing close to someone at a party who starts talking to you. You immediately notice their bad breath (~aerosols). Now imagine they are wearing a mask, then imagine you both are. How much of the bad breath would you still notice in each case? That's the effect of masks.
So much of what governments are doing in response to this are just cargo cult science. We've had ample time to run proper controlled trials for much of this stuff -- the Danes were able to do so with masks [1], and there was a big study of gyms out of Norway [2] -- it's simply pathetic that our governments mostly haven't bothered.
[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.24.20138768v...
Treating R, the number of infections from each case, as though it was the same everywhere is just a way of simplifying the model, but the map is not the territory and we need to be a lot more careful about whether our simplifying assumptions change the overall behaviour of the system being modelled than we have been.
In effect masks buy you a more open environment where people can leave their homes and do more stuff. Further, when locations decide to shutdown that shutdown is more effective.
You're grinding an axe here, but it has little to do with what I wrote.
Did someone claim it was? The name of the game is and has always been suppressing the transmission rate of the virus. Masks are a low impact way to help a little bit towards that goal, nothing more.
Here's what Biden said:
> The first day I'm inaugurated to say I'm going to ask the public for 100 days to mask. Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days.
Again, he didn't say that wearing a mask is enough, but with the 100-day timeline, reading between the lines, he's saying it will drive down the case count.
It started as just two weeks to flatten the curve, remember.
Could it be ocular transmission?
https://www.ajmc.com/view/can-wearing-eyeglasses-mitigate-co...
Melbourne started their lockdown in winter. Everyone obeyed it. It was strongly enforced [1, 2]. They beat coronavirus. And now they can enjoy their summer.
I live in London. At one point in the summer, our covid rates were lower than Melbourne's. But the UK's messaging was confused and contradictory ("eat out to help out", test and trace was shambolic, rules were not enforced). So no one is the least surprised that it has got out of control again so quickly.
[1] My parents live half an hour's drive from Melbourne. Police stopped every car on the highways to enforce no travel, fined the drivers and made them turn back home.
[2] One party of 26 people got busted ordering KFC to the same address and fined $26,000.
>The Avalon cluster has grown to 38, with 21 out of yesterday's 23 cases linked to it and another two still under investigation.
It isn't fair and might not even be entirely honest to describe this to a (mostly US) audience with a phrase like "numbers seem to be up again".
The trigger for Australia to go back into lockdown would be considered a giant fat ignorable nothingburger in almost every part of the US.
Short lockdown maybe, back to normal soon, not too many other places will be able to brag about that.
We will be able to save all the lives prior to vaccination that nations with less willpower seem willing to spend.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/drericlevi/status/132282229786701...
[1] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...
However there are several contributing factors and it certainly doesn’t come down to mask use as the primary one as mask discipline in the UK hasn’t been bad in my experience.
This is a seasonal disease (the main reason for the UK summer reprieve), and it’s now summer in Australia, and they have also been far better at quarantines and contact tracing and have used this period wisely to get the disease under control. All these factors matter in a response, and the UK has suffered from panic management and a lack of difficult measures at the right time and is now entering the peak season for this sort of virus so things will get worse for a month or two at least, even with a new lockdown.
I'm all for managing the virus spread but if the policies are a piece of meat, in the UK the policies are uncooked in Melbourne they were burnt.
The .au epidemiologists I've heard on NPR have made it clear that what worked in Melbourne was everything they did, including a lockdown and including contact tracing.
As I said - there are other factors here (many more than I mentioned) - that you can't compare countries so easily.
1) hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and
2) less people die unnecessarily
they need binary good/bad cause/effect edicts, like children. state and municipal governments are poorly catering to their own velocity based directives, and the juvenile more simplistic expectations of their population.
I see little to no compliance with customers or shop keepers in places like that.
I also saw lots of maskless partying and social drinking in November.
This is the bigger problem.
I got Covid from community transmission. I quarantined in my house, away from my wife, and wore a mask 24/7.
She didn't get my Covid.
Masks work, but people have to bloody well use them.
Out of curiosity, did she get tested? What about for antibodies?
She didn't get tested for antibodies as the health system has far more important things to deal with right now in the US, unfortunately.
I never got it.
An anecdote means very little, and certainly is not evidence that masks work without controls for every other thing that might have prevented you from getting infected.
The wearing of masks by retail employees has been mandatory in England since 24th September [1].
Up here in Manchester I don't recall seeing any supermarket workers not wearing them. I can easily believe that conditions in London are different though.
[1] https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2020/09/face-masks-made...
At the end of the day this whole thing is dependent on the weakest link and there are a lot of weak links in society.
I think the general more aggressive Spanish way of communicating helps a lot.
They always believed in "herd immunity", so they're going to run with the minimum restrictions that achieve an ""acceptable"" death rate.
We still don't have a great picture of what's driving the infections, due to the failure of track&trace. I suspect it's schools, universities, workplaces, and (unfortunately) hospitals, but I don't have handy evidence for that.
Having Folkestone jammed with containers of undistributed PPE while the clock runs down to the Brexit logistics crisis isn't helping either.
Anyway, the Tory public have been inexplicably satisfied with the performance so far, and are probably going to widely ignore the last-minute changes to Christmas rules.
Getting the measures right gets rid of covid and lets people get back to normal. Bad measures give the worst of both worlds, prolonging the problem.
If there were a country with the nerve to have no 'measures' at all, they would have herd immunity, a pile of corpses, some long-term health conditions from covid (that we will have, too- everyone's getting this thing), no long-term health conditions from everyone being locked in their homes for a year, no year+ fucking of the economy, less consolidation of wealth into the hands of a few, less of an immediate risk of an increase in authoritarianism via increasing the power of the local government...
For some size of 'a discrepancy in the pile of corpses (from this year)', I would, if I could push a button and switch to the world where people were left to do as they may, push it. A lot of people would, too, it's just too callous and inhuman to admit that yeah, sorry, if you're 85 and going to die in 3 years from the flu anyway your continued life might not be worth the price of greatly inconveniencing a 25-year-old for a year.
The rules stopped being followed some time ago, and I'll tell you why.
We can't believe in the government anymore, and it's because there's been too many cases of one rule for the people, one for the rulers. Multiple government level staff have been caught breaking the rules. Cummings was maybe the most egregious case, a known positive driving hundreds of miles to his parents, who is then protected by the PM from sacking. On top of that, when he actually did get sacked it was due to a petty internal power struggle months later, with no mention of the breach. Then there was the scientist with the affair, the MP who took the train back to Scotland, and so on. Plus stories of cronyism in who was given contracts to service the covid needs.
I can see why people think the rules are a theatre. They obviously don't think the rules matter, or that it matters whether we get the required projects done by competent people.
We elected a talker to waffle his way through the Brexit negotiations. That would have worked, because those treaties are impenetrable to normal people; He can do a bit of clever rhetoric to talk up this or that point, and nobody is any wiser because they won't know what it's like to be a cheese import business with no voice in the media. Now the game is up, because you can't talk your way out of a global pandemic, it's too far from normal politics to have practiced stepping around.
Authoritative collectivist monocultures are doing great with this pandemic, and that is practically the only combination that has a grip on things.
Collectivist definitely help.
They are great at controlling the flow of information.
You could call them sensible, mature, selfless societies.
Either way one cuts it, the UK is neither.
Authoritative:
I don't consider less-inclusive political systems worse. They have best, average and worse cases, where the problem is that they get worst case many times over. A benevolent dictatorship is capable of getting the best case results, the predictable threat is that their replacement will not be capable of stewarding resources the same way.
Whereas more inclusive political systems get average case results more reliably and it is practically impossible to get a best case result with a lot of energy continually necessary to avoid worst case results.
Collectivist:
I don't consider collectivist to be a pejorative term and don't know of any context where it is. You picked a synonym, selfless.
Monoculture:
Just a fact of life. Where monocultures help them be able to predict what their neighbor does and trust that result, then large-scale immediate coordination without the state is easy. It isn't impossible for a multicultural society to achieve the same benefits, its also not happening. Unlike others that might use this word, I am not making any statement on a preferred living arrangement.
Oh I don't know, socialism scares republican voters shitless, I wouldn't be surprised if collectivism did too.
These words are not inherently insults regardless of how allergic other people are to adjectives.
All good though.
It's the willingness and ability to take effective measures, not the geography, that matters.
Australia has a lower population than California, by the way. Obviously, its pop is mostly spread over the east coast, but compared to the UK it's extremely sparse, with no tunnels connecting it to the mainland. It's disingenuous (at best) to think that the island nations that had successful lockdowns were all doing something magically better than other places with significant restrictions to daily life like France, Italy, California, etc. because they couldn't realistically close their borders to ground traffic.
And obviously you can close a land border as well, it's just a matter of whether you're willing to do it. Australia also imposed tight restrictions on most of the land borders between states.
Here, nearby in NSW our public health system is really good. We're currently dealing with out third significant outbreak - seems to be an escape from an overseas arrival - but we can justifiably be confident that we are able to stamp these things out without too much disruption (relatively speaking).
(One of the world's biggest airports, several of Europe's busiest, frequent direct rail connection to the continent, frequent ferries on many routes, fully integrated free trade + work zone.)
"According to Getlink, the company which operates the Channel Tunnel, 1.64 million trucks traveled between the UK and the EU using the crossing last year. More than 2.5 million cars made the crossing, as did 51,229 buses and 2,012 freight trains.
Added to the even greater volumes of truck crossings made on ferries — the Port of Dover handled a record 2.6 million trucks in 2017, according to its own figures — it accounts for a massive annual volume."
People love to make excuses or put up obstructions to an idea, but solutions are almost always achievable with a little planning, resources and the will to make it happen.
Our (UK) response has been a bit of a clusterfuck so far, we're not a good example to judge by.
Barnard Castle alone probably killed thousands, the way this government is doing contracts is probably criminal, we fucked up the T&T for months etc. etc. etc. etc.
Voting Mr Bean into office would constitute a comedy of errors; but what we have now (when you also throw Brexit into the mix) is far from funny.
> time period during which the UK would've had to do this for it to be effective
.. lies roughly from Feburary to the present day. No reason to allow travel from countries with significant prevalence.
> all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive, xenophobic and made things worse
[citation needed]
[citation needed]
Let's reverse the burden of evidence, and request [citation needed] for your implicit claim that the open borders lobby is not relevant here?
> the WHO and all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive,
I'd argue that these were very much the wrong-thinking people. And that the WHO advice has been pretty terrible throughout. It seems obvious to me that closing borders is appropriate in a pandemic. The UK still hasn't done this. Lots of people were going abroad on holiday between lockdowns.
I'm not familiar with freight in Europe, so please excuse the diversion.
They drive freight vehicles onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle or on ferries? I'm guessing this isn't containerized freight, which would seem to make sense to transfer to freight rail (at least to cross the channel).
With the very porous border, there is little lost time through checks -- it was easy to send the driver all the way from Germany to Manchester. I think from leaving the French motorway to driving onto the British one takes about an hour by lorry-on-train.
By ferry, it's little different than going from Germany to Denmark by ferry. They will glance at the passport as well as the ticket.
Boarding the train : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8r0kjJvvIY
(Cars go on a different train, enclosed and you stay in your car.)
Both, although more volume goes through the ferries. (tunnel trains is 1.5 million trucks a year or something in that ballpark if I remember correctly)
“To put this into context, there are about 6,000 vehicles we would expect, just under in Dover today, probably I’d say 4,000 would have gone across from Dover, just under 2,000 on the Eurotunnel,” he said.
“But there’s probably something like 32,000 units that would have been the daily total so the vast majority including virtually all the vaccine actually comes via container.”
Containers will mostly be on ships, but some will come on normal freight trains. (Eurotunnel is the lorries-on-trains service.)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/21/france-ban-uk-...
Educational 108
Hospital 42
Care home 38
Workplace 20
Other 10
Prisons 1
Food outlet/restaurant 1
Schools, hospitals, care homes, and workplaces account for the huge majority of spread. There's no empirical reason to think either tube trains or supermarkets are the problem.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-flu-and-co...
Of the traced outbreaks, most were in schools. But that is not really a surprise, as outbreaks in schools are really easy to trace. If you have a group of 25 students which basically spend 40 hours a week together and they all get sick, super obvious. But how do you trace clients of a restaurant back to a restaurant? You mostly don't.
My reading of these lists is as a mix between places that are easy to trace, and places where really a lot of infections are happening. It is hard to tell which are which and which are both. Not to mention where the other missing 80% of cases came from.
Weirdly I see slightly different numbers... Table 2 on page number 26 of the first pdf? Sorry if I'm looking in the wrong place...
Either way, I think this relies on contact tracing data, but contact tracing doesn't happen on trains or in supermarkets (super markets are exempt why exactly? No one knows). That's why their zeros...
Just been to the Tesco at Roneo Corner in Havering (1 borough further out than Barking and Dageham).
38 customers without a mask inside the store (excludes kids even teens, excludes anyone with a pointless visor, excludes anyone with a green and yellow lanyard which means they're exempt).
8 members of staff without a mask (again, excluding as above).
Highlights include:
* a woman in Islamic dress with a head scarf and eye veil, she had covered every inch of her skin EXCEPT for her mouth and nose.
* a staff member with a managers badge and no mask
* a parent who took off his mask and gave it to his baby to play with once he was inside
* an aisle with about 40 people crammed in looking at the discount section with a staff member with no mask holding a "2m social distance" sign and getting in people's way, but not stopping them or asking anyone to move on!?
But this isn't really true: "One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning.
Covid is pretty contagious, but you really need to be around someone for ~15 minutes to have a good chance of infecting them. Superspreading events can occur, but they are fairly rare.
I bet supermarkets aren't big transmission vectors.
> If you just want the results: one person (Case B) infected two other people (case A and C) from a distance away of 6.5 meters (~21 feet) and 4.8m (~15 feet). Case B and case A overlapped for just five minutes at quite a distance away. These people were well beyond the current 6 feet / 2 meter guidelines of CDC and much further than the current 3 feet / one meter distance advocated by the WHO. And they still transmitted the virus.
While it might take some time for an infected person in close proximity to push a specific second person across some risk threshold in a 1-on-1 interaction, that's not the scenario we're worried about.
We're worried about how many people an infected person might infect during many, many interactions.
Even if the probability of infection is low in a single 2 minute interaction, some people in service jobs have thousands of interactions a day. (not all one-on-one).
...if you are the only one around them who is infectious.
Does that mean that someone has to breath in my virus for 15 minutes before there's enough of it inside them to infect them?
Or does it mean that if I'm the infected staff member constantly spewing virus near an ever-changing cast of shoppers, I can expect to infect about 4 people an hour, some of whom were near me for only seconds?
This one. Kinda. The timing may vary, and it's a risk distribution, so there are tails on the low and high ends.
I think that is probably true, after all we continued to buy groceries right through the lockdown period and cases remained low.
Here's video from one (St Pancras, about 35m people per normal year) today: https://twitter.com/scattermoon/status/1340393706009079812?s...
Most people appear to be wearing masks, but still it's not ideal.
I remember the 2011 riots, courts were run 24h a day, sentences were extreme and people were tired and convicted the same day as the offense. That's very heavy handed. But that shows you the priority here.
Sensible legislation never rushed but forward thinking is the only option, not running kangaroo legal system suddenly.
And the people outside the supermarket who grab the dirty spray bottle handled by 500 people already, clean their trolley handle but not their hands, then put the mask on their face handling it, then rub their eye and go shopping.
Humans stupid.
I don't think this has been the case since September. Admittedly too late, IMO, but I think it has been the law since then.
Apparently the enforcement and compliance with the rules is night and day different here. They described London as a place with rules that everyone just ignores.
Australia is in summer, so it would make more sense to compare it to the UK’s summer, if you insist on comparing two countries with very different population densities (a key factor in the spread of COVID-19).
[0] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...
[1] https://twitter.com/drericlevi/status/1322822297867018240?s=...
yes I know I posted essentially the same information to two comments, I apologise for the spam
Is that really so? As I recall the viral load has to cross a minimal threshold before infection develops, and even then the lower the load the milder the illness.
A store employee with his mouth shut whom you pass by in about 3 seconds is a far cry from someone who is singing at you at 10 ft distance for an hour, or eating and chatting for that same hour.
That is an enormous over-exaggeration. It's a virus, not a magic spell. Plus, employees are not required to wear masks, but customers are.
> Time and again we see them decline scientific advice
Which scientific advice have they declined? So far as I can see, Boris is entirely under the influence of SAGE and does nothing without "scientific advice".
That's exactly my point.
He ignored calls for a September "circuit breaker", then had to panic in October.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/world/boris-johnson-ignor...
This article lists a host of other times scientists have been ignored then proven right:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-government-boris-johnson-...
Is it policy for the officers to pull one out and say 'you do now'?
Supermarkets do that sometimes at the door and good for them. But at this point, I'm tired of people "forgetting". I think it's time for actual enforcement.
I assume the large majority of tube users are the non compliant, simply because so few of the compliant have any reason to actually need to use the tube, so your 50% doesn't surprise me at all, certainly not that it's low.
I haven't worn a mask twice. Once because I forgot it and once because I just forgot to put it on.
If "I don't have one" isn't an acceptable excuse what am I supposed to do: produce one out of thin air? It's not like they give out free ones if you forget. There are so many signs now that they're basically invisible. If I'm fined for not wearing it I'll stop wearing it entirely.
How is it that after nearly 10 months of this would you not have a mask?
Do you also think that "sorry officer, I didn't realise that getting completely sloshed and then driving was illegal, what am I supposed to to? Suddenly sober up?"
> If I'm fined for not wearing it I'll stop wearing it entirely.
This makes absolutely no sense.
So you want to be fined daily because you got fined once for not wearing a mask during a pandemic?
And people don't understand why it's spreading so much.
That's like saying
> I was fined for dangerous driving, and because of this I'm now only going to drive on the wrong side of the road.
I have one in my car, a spare in my backpack, keep one in my jacket pocket, and a cheap disposable in my wallet folded up. That way if I forget, I'll have one.
My city in Australia had a grace period for everyone to get a mask. After that a lot of fines were handed out.
Without fines I doubt we'd have seen compliance anywhere near as high because there are a lot of people who don't want to wear them but do because they fear the fine.
When hardly anyone is wearing a mask you feel a bit weird or silly.
When half the people are wearing masks you look at the people who are and aren't and can't help but wonder which side is your in-group.
When fines are enforced, everyone has an "excuse" to wear a mask. Darn fines.
Then, when everyone is wearing a mask you feel naked if you don't have one. Only the seriously anti-social will defect.
Why the hell not? Seems like the very first thing they should be doing.
2 cases in particular stand out to me:
Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to why you're not wearing a mask.
Supermarkets continue to be rammed, but staff aren't required to wear masks. Nor are they enforcing the requirement on customers beyond the door. One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning. Wtf aren't staff required to wear masks?
The attitude here is rapidly becoming "why should I bother if no one else is?". And frankly, I think the government know and encourage this. Its all but policy. Time and again we see them decline scientific advice, then act surprised when infection rates spike.
I'm especially frustrated as my best friend lives in Melbourne. Despite lockdown starting at basically the same time, and some crazy bad luck/incidents, Melbourne is back to BAU.