Tier 4

[tenchboy]

Plucky welsh people refuse to kow tow to foreign menace
or something

[Tessa K]

We're gonna need a bigger tier

or, alternatively, WHAT THE f.ck WAS STILL ALLOWED IN TIER 4 WHICH THERE IS LEFT TO FORBID

With a side order of "forcing the schools to stay open before Christmas was entirely correct children don't get covid but now forcing them to close is entirely correct something something children can get the new variant"

The only difference I've noticed round here between Tier 4 and total lockdown is that cafes are open for takeaways.

[Hunting Dog]

I'm assuming in Tier 5 schools and churches would shut.

Possibly also don't meet anyone outside your household even for 1 + 1 exercise outdoors. Maybe wear masks outdoors?

My poor little town is still top of the UK charts for virus per 100,000 so I'll probably be able to let you know soon...



I was slightly perturbed (bearing in mind we have the highest current level) that in our local small supermarket yesterday, one staff member who wasn't wearing a mask, was standing close to another staff member, and I overheard her saying she "felt a bit rough" in congested voice... I avoided them and left as quickly as possible via the self-serve thing!

[sTeamTraen]

I'm assuming in Tier 5 schools and churches would shut.

Possibly also don't meet anyone outside your household even for 1 + 1 exercise outdoors. Maybe wear masks outdoors?

In the first lockdown in Spain (from 14 March for 6 or 7 weeks), we were not allowed out of the house for exercise, at all. I live literally next door to a 126ha park (when I take the rubbish out, the bins are 3 metres from the gate) and we looked at it longingly the whole time.

Also, masks have been mandatory here everywhere, including in the street, since July. People just get on with it. We have still had transmission in schools, bars, and at home, but I reckon that if you want to avoid COVID here, you can.

My poor little town is still top of the UK charts for virus per 100,000 so I'll probably be able to let you know soon...

Is that Brentwood, by any chance? #1 daughter is hunkered down there.

[Hunting Dog]

Is that Brentwood, by any chance? #1 daughter is hunkered down there.

That's the one - came as bit of a surprise to be the worst area!

Hunkering down is definitely the right approach Essex has just declared a 'Major Incident' over hospital capacity

[Tessa K]

The Oxford vaccine just got approval but being realistic, how long is it going to take to vaccinate everyone (twice) and what happens in the meantime? I'm not expecting to get called for a jab until well into the spring.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55280671

[sTeamTraen]

The Oxford vaccine just got approval but being realistic, how long is it going to take to vaccinate everyone (twice) and what happens in the meantime? I'm not expecting to get called for a jab until well into the spring.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55280671

It will be interesting to see what happens when most of the 10-15% most vulnerable people are vaccinated and so the death and hospitalisation rates drop, say by mid-February for deaths and mid-March for hospital admissions. There could be a lot less popular support for lockdown measures if the numbers of deaths fall to the "typical flu season" level. If at that point they open the pubs, you could have half a million cases a day shortly afterwards and then you'd have the same number of deaths and hospitalisations among younger people, just at the rate of 0.02% of cases instead of 5%.

There may also be quite a good effect from the first dose of the vaccine. Obviously we all have to follow the protocol, but I don't think the effect of the first dose will be zero.

[lpm]

I think the timings work well.

Jan and Feb are going to be awful, with a horrific death toll and hospital overcrowding, so support for full lockdown will remain strong throughout. Don't forget, a large majority of the UK are fully in favour of strong lockdown and it's just that the denier/whining minority is able to make a lot of noise. A national Tier 5 will get supported and mostly complied with.

The vaccine will dent the death rate soon and will be clearly apparent in the data by the second half of Feb.

Assuming the vaccine prevents transmission to a large degree - which seems reasonable even if there's no evidence yet - the vaccine herd immunity will start to help by March and April. Yes, the government will reopen pubs, but I don't think this will trigger another wave of infections, let alone hospitalisations/deaths.

[shpalman]

I think the timings work well.

Jan and Feb are going to be awful, with a horrific death toll and hospital overcrowding, so support for full lockdown will remain strong throughout. Don't forget, a large majority of the UK are fully in favour of strong lockdown and it's just that the denier/whining minority is able to make a lot of noise. A national Tier 5 will get supported and mostly complied with.

The vaccine will dent the death rate soon and will be clearly apparent in the data by the second half of Feb.

Assuming the vaccine prevents transmission to a large degree - which seems reasonable even if there's no evidence yet - the vaccine herd immunity will start to help by March and April. Yes, the government will reopen pubs, but I don't think this will trigger another wave of infections, let alone hospitalisations/deaths.

It it could at least get to the point where both the weather and the number of people vaccinated allows a bit of outdoor pubbery to start happening. It would be difficult to argue for forbidding it, based on whatever the new-infections and deaths numbers are doing. I'd hope to argue for waiting a bit longer before reopening so that there's a bit more control over what happens.

[jimbob]

I think the timings work well.

Jan and Feb are going to be awful, with a horrific death toll and hospital overcrowding, so support for full lockdown will remain strong throughout. Don't forget, a large majority of the UK are fully in favour of strong lockdown and it's just that the denier/whining minority is able to make a lot of noise. A national Tier 5 will get supported and mostly complied with.

As an aside, the covid deniers who are making money out of this. (eg Ivor Cummins - @FatEmperor with his kickstarter project "to make a film" and his patraeon account with sufficient followers* to make a very comfortable sideline from promoting this).


*It's ironic how uniform the KBF loons are in calling people sheep for looking at reputable sources of data.

[shpalman]

many places in England – including all of the north-east, Greater Manchester, large parts of the Midlands and the south-west – would move up to the strictest tier 4 rules from Thursday morning

That'll help with the 1539.8/100,000/week rate in Brentwood.

[Little waster]

Plucky welsh people refuse to kow tow to foreign menace
or something

Meanwhile in Cumbria

https://cumbriacrack.com/2020/12/30/lak ... y-at-home/

Can’t find the specific link but one of the numpties rescued had travelled up from London because obviously “don’t travel out of area unless absolutely essential” doesn’t apply to getting lost on the Cumbrian fells for the lulz and requiring a dozen volunteers to risk their lives retrieving you.

[Millennie Al]

...vaccination...

It it could at least get to the point where both the weather and the number of people vaccinated allows a bit of outdoor pubbery to start happening. It would be difficult to argue for forbidding it, based on whatever the new-infections and deaths numbers are doing. I'd hope to argue for waiting a bit longer before reopening so that there's a bit more control over what happens.

I expect that as soon as vaccination covers a small proportion of the population, and lockdown has substantially reduced the cases and deaths, there will be the same complacency as we have seen before and the government will relax restrictions. Additionally, enough people will think we're doing so well that they can all go back to licking each other's eyeballs, causing a new surge. It's like having a party on the edge of a crumbling cliff with no sense of danger that we might be better off stepping back - it's overwhemingly dominated by people (especially those in government) constant trying to see how much we can get away with.

[egbert26]

Is that Brentwood, by any chance? #1 daughter is hunkered down there.

That's the one - came as bit of a surprise to be the worst area!

Hunkering down is definitely the right approach Essex has just declared a 'Major Incident' over hospital capacity

I'm not far from Brentwood so I've been keeping an eye on the stats; I'd estimate we are a week behind you. It appears that regardless of tier, a..eholes are gonna a..eh.le:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-55506681

I despair.

[Tessa K]

Is that Brentwood, by any chance? #1 daughter is hunkered down there.

That's the one - came as bit of a surprise to be the worst area!

Hunkering down is definitely the right approach Essex has just declared a 'Major Incident' over hospital capacity

I'm not far from Brentwood so I've been keeping an eye on the stats; I'd estimate we are a week behind you. It appears that regardless of tier, a..eholes are gonna a..eh.le:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-55506681

I despair.

And over 50 parties broken up by the Met. They should have the letter A for a..eh.le stamped in indelible ink on their foreheads.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-55507599

[Martin Y]

What if instead the party-goers got pushed to the front of the vaccination queue? Target the a..eholes who're going to do the spreading anyway.

Yes, I can see the flaws.

[shpalman]

What if instead the party-goers got pushed to the front of the vaccination queue? Target the a..eholes who're going to do the spreading anyway.

Yes, I can see the flaws.

What if we just quarantine them all with each other at that French rave for the next two weeks to make sure that none of them have it, or that they all get it.

[bob sterman]

What if we just quarantine them all with each other at that French rave for the next two weeks to make sure that none of them have it, or that they all get it.

If they like partying so much - how about a new compulsory 6 month Isle of Wight festival???

[shpalman]

What if we just quarantine them all with each other at that French rave for the next two weeks to make sure that none of them have it, or that they all get it.

If they like partying so much - how about a new compulsory 6 month Isle of Wight festival???

That's hardly fair on the Isle of Wight, who did quite well thanks to being the testing ground for the UK's failed home-grown tracing app and are even now only at about 240/100,000/week.

Maybe we could leave them on party boats. And leave the tedious older well-if-you're-going-to-get-it-you're-going-to-get-it people on cruise ships.

[shpalman]

... currently here in Tier 4 this weekend, I can pop inside the local Costa to get a takeaway croissant and latte, kids saturday morning soccer is on (organised outdoor sport for under 18s is allowed), I can pop to the DIY store to get that shelf I've really been meaning to fit in the bathroom.

Tomorrow I can attend a "place of worship" for a service, and then visit the garden centre to buy a gnome for the lawn. Then I might pop in to the local archery club for some practice, play a round of golf and visit a zoo.

Today and tomorrow there's a nationwide red level in all of Italy. Monday will be orange before turning red again for the 5th and 6th. At some point there'll be a decision about what colour each region will be as of the 7th.

Red means about the only thing I can do is go to the supermarket for essentials, although I could also go out for work purposes if I had any (my lab is closed until the 7th) or health reasons. I'm allowed to exercise nearby. One visit a day to friends or relatives within the same region is allowed because it's Christmas.

It's possible to go in and get a takeaway coffee (until 6pm anyway) although I notice bars are blocking their doors with tables so that they can serve you without you having to go in.

I think "organized worship" is allowed.

Organized sport has been shut down since October so no kids' soccer and no archery practice or golf either because even the non-contact sport got shut down eventually, including gyms.

I think the DIY store is open here too.

The nearest zoo I can think of, isn't open.

Orange will mean non-essential shops can open.

And yet Lombardy, which was a red zone back when the zone protocol was first defined, and peaked at about 600/100,000/week two months ago, got cases down to 150/7 days/hundred thousand in a month such that it became an orange zone and was briefly yellow before the Christmas rules came in to force.

The "tier" system Italy had was working in that the red zones eventually became orange and the orange zones eventually became yellow.

Differences with the UK:

• Masks have to be worn at all times, even outside.
• No gyms or sport unless it's considered important at the national or regional level (i.e. the kind the most people watch on tv, not the kind that most people do themselves).
• I don't remember when the schools closed but the universities went to total distance-learning at the end of October except for labs and stuff; fewer and fewer students were showing up in person anyway (it was optional for them but not for us).
• Not in a travel corridor with the UK even before you bred the special new extra-contagious-between-children variant so a negative PCR result was required either within 72 hours before or 48 hours after arriving. (Now you need both of those and to self-isolate for 14 days.) The UK has never had a testing regime for arrivals it just assumes people are going to self-isolate, and nobody actually checks, so they don't.

[bolo]

What if instead the party-goers got pushed to the front of the vaccination queue? Target the a..eholes who're going to do the spreading anyway.

Yes, I can see the flaws.

Or perhaps bring back capital punishment, just temporarily.

[Martin Y]

What if instead the party-goers got pushed to the front of the vaccination queue? Target the a..eholes who're going to do the spreading anyway.

Yes, I can see the flaws.

Or perhaps bring back capital punishment, just temporarily.

Not sure how viable it is to do it temporarily; it tends to be permanent.

[shpalman]

What if instead the party-goers got pushed to the front of the vaccination queue? Target the a..eholes who're going to do the spreading anyway.

Yes, I can see the flaws.

More seriously, we don't know if the vaccine would prevent people from being asymptomatic/mild spreaders of teh covids in the way that we know it prevents severe cases.

But then people were saying that children wouldn't spread covid-19 in schools because they didn't tend to suffer severe cases of the disease of covid-19 disease, which makes sense in the same way that the above hypothesis about vaccines doesn't, and probably isn't true anymore either thanks to B.1.1.7 depending on whether you believe this or this.

Less seriously, I am willing to wait patiently in line, sacrificing some of the things I enjoy, while health care workers, forces of law and order,* older people and care home residents, and those with underlying conditions get their vaccines. I am not willing to let these f.cking fuckboys go ahead of me so they can go out f.cking. They can f.ck off.

* - not the police in Paris who were scared of a bunch of kids having a rave though

[Rich Scopie]

What if we just quarantine them all with each other at that French rave for the next two weeks to make sure that none of them have it, or that they all get it.

If they like partying so much - how about a new compulsory 6 month Isle of Wight festival???

Could they cope with that much Hawkwind?

[discovolante]

What if we just quarantine them all with each other at that French rave for the next two weeks to make sure that none of them have it, or that they all get it.

If they like partying so much - how about a new compulsory 6 month Isle of Wight festival???

Could they cope with that much Hawkwind?

I think Hawkwind would pose the biggest threat of the spread of the virus yet given that they would probably get through about 20 new members during that period.