Are the COVID trends positive enough for ministers to ease the lockdown? – politicalbetting.com
Are the COVID trends positive enough for ministers to ease the lockdown? – politicalbetting.com
Tomorrow is a massive day in the government’s efforts to control the pandemic with Johnson due to make a statement with what is being termed the “road-map” back to normality whatever that is deemed to be.
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Personally, I would make it regional, but it may be simpler to have national triggers.
Much speculation, of course, that March 8th will include all of the schools at once, but if most or all of the secondary kids got put off until after the Easter holidays then that would be understandable. Everyone else is going to have to wait.
Just so long as they aren't so deliberately vague that they can keep shifting the goalposts if they feel a little nervous, or else this could take way longer than it needs to.
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-when-will-lockdown-be-lifted-when-is-pms-announcement-johnson-prepares-to-meet-ministers-to-discuss-roadmap-out-of-lockdown-12222355
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/21/uk-17-year-olds-mental-health-crisis
7% of 17 yo attempting suicide and 24% self harming in the last year.
We don't have the health infrastructure to deal with such a tsunami. It will require a revolution.
Maybe ( from previous discussions) something for Labour to champion?
But it won’t happen: 8 March has been so widely briefed it must be happening.
Maybe beer gardens / fashion / hair / beauty etc 2 April
Indoor pubs 1 May.
Something like that I’d guess. But who knows?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9284019/Britains-economy-lose-18-BILION-international-travel-restrictions-remain-place.html
It sounds like a huge amount of money and it is....but to put that in context, thats about the cost of 1.5-2 weeks of lockdown.
Still, we don't have long to wait now until we find out how far they intend to go.
That extra 5 weeks of vaccination time not opening secondary schools on the 8th buys us could be the difference between never needing lockdown again or having to hold onto non-school lockdown measures for another 2-3 months while hospitals handle a new wave of patients aged 40-60
Next to lockdown, the cost of keeping airlines and tour operators on life support can be paid from loose change.
And if Brits stay home and save money rather than travelling to a rather limited number of British seaside destinations, then the economy won't have benefited.
(The problem is that the UK's tourist industry - destinations, hotels, etc. - are geared to where people coming to Britain would like to go. They're focused on heritage. That doesn't necessarily match up with where John from Gateshead wants to go get some sunshine and time by the pool. Simply, tourism is not fungible.)
The roadmap will be more bullish than most expect.
Big bang for schools. All of them back on 8th March.
No regional variations. One nation under the groove.
With supply and demand being such, a week in a guesthouse in Skegness will be significantly more than a fortnight including flights to the Rui Resort Hotel in Gran Canaria would normally cost. Red Wallers will be spitting bullets!
It is our third ever UK holiday in 11 years of being a couple and then married, the £2-3k we normally spend on our big annual trip will get spent in the UK this year. UK restaurants, pubs and hotels will get that money, a UK car rental company will benefit from us not being able to go overseas and I'm certain it's not an isolated case.
among the 15,000 people in Stamford Hill’s Jewish community it is 75 per cent for working age adults, according to a report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/stamford-hill-highest-covid-infections-world-b920632.html?amp
I seemed to remember reading that in Israel the Haredim Jews account for 12% of the population, but are 40% of the cases.
7% sounds entirely believable to me.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2019registrations
Most likely it will be a gradual process, schools reopening next month along with universities, non-essential shops from April along with pub gardens and pubs reopening their bars indoors and restaurants for indoor dining from May. That way those vaccinated will also be able to use their antibodies and build up immunity by winter without too fast a reopening leading to rapid mutations.
Well off middle and upper class folks will be able to book themselves into nice country house hotels, and while they'll pay more than usual, they'll get nice holidays.
But there simply isn't the capacity for average Joes to go on vacation in the UK: don't forget that Padstow was full in a typical year, even before the effective banning of foreign travel. Where there will be capacity will be in places like London, where there are hotels set up for people on the heritage trail. And I'm not sure that Steve from Sunderland wants to go to London to look at Buckingham Palace. (Although I admit I could be wrong.)
But don't forget that's on top of federal restrictions.
I think the most likely thing is that Air B&B tries to meet the surge.
Indeed, we seem to have visitors here already. I don’t know how or why, given the restrictions, but there are people I haven’t seen before with dogs we haven’t met before going round taking photos of stuff, not the behaviour of people who live here. Perhaps Sean isn’t the only one getting restless as the lockdown grinds on?
I agree that it is likely to be a negative sum game in terms of overall money spent by UK holidaygoers, what I'm suggesting is that because the proportion of money spent by them will be ca. 95% domestic even the lesser amount of money spent will be more than the UK normally makes in a standard year from tourism.
Though I agree that it will make hotspots and notspots. Places like Edinburgh, Devon and South Wales will probably do relatively better than places like London which relies on foreign tourists to go to tourist sites (something any self respecting Londoner avoids at all cost).
But the popular image is of a teenage girl - especially telegenic girls who were the daughter of a BBC producer.
It ought to be reasonable to say that the vaccinations in Europe aren't far enough, so its not safe to travel to Europe for vacations this summer - but its safe to have vacations at home and next year we'll be able to have sunny holidays abroad.
At least then people will know what to expect and can make plans.
On the subject of ludicrous tunnel projects, why not build a tunnel from Penzance to the Isles of Scilly? 28 miles from Lands End and pace the Faeroes, we could have a new station built under Hugh Town to provide direct access from London and the rest of the UK.
Guaranteed supplies for the islands - no worries if the weather closes down flights or the Scillonian.
From Hugh Town, underground cycle ways or a light railway linking the islands - perhaps a tram to Tresco for the gardens.
And people have been imprisoned without charge or trial for far too long.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
7% is "attempted in lifetime".
TBF on this the G was clear, and misquoted here.
Seriously, I guess that the prospects for travel in the medium term depend on how the Government feels about letting double vaccinated people loose to fly overseas to countries with substantially higher prevalence (given that we are frequently reminded that vaccines are less than 100% effective and mutant strains remain a threat.) We know that all the European mass market beach holiday destinations are a long way behind the UK with their vaccine programmes, and that dark mutterings about resurgences or new waves have started to emerge from a number of major EU states (third wave talk in Germany, requests for lockdowns from regional leaders in France and an uptick in cases in Italy have all been reported today.)
Personally I'd rather that foreign holidays were just written off for the year, or at least until some other destinations have got to the same place we have and we can open travel corridors with them (though currently the only sunshine getaway that looks like it will be done anywhere close to our timescales is Malta, which obviously doesn't have the capacity to satisfy the demands of millions and millions of beached Beluga whale Brits.) If we successfully get to the point where we can wave goodbye to more and more fucking lockdowns with a reasonable degree of confidence, then risking it all by exposing ourselves to the importation of vaccine evading Plague from overseas simply ain't worth it.
Even if we are allowed to go abroad, is it likely to be an attractive offer? If Europe is still locked down or mandating masks, people will think twice before going abroad eben if they can.
I really hope we get a dry summer though...
Personally not being able to go abroad is absolutely no inconvenience to me. I have three young children. Foreign holidays with small children are either prohibitively expensive or terrible.
https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1363516340267610117
(Though apparently we aren't
Sunak has yet to announce any extension to furlough - currently due to end on 30 April. The last extension was announced in December. If, and it’s a big if, it was anticipated that the economy would remain substantially closed after 30 April it has to be extended soon for businesses to plan.
You won't get that in England as it won't be in England to happen. It could be overseas
Having a holiday in the UK is not "imprisoned without charge or trial" - but people bringing this bastard bug back causing us to return to lockdown again? That would be.
BBC News - Call for inquiry into Carrie Symonds' influence in No 10
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56145491
According to the Daily Mail (so it must be true), all over 50s in East London are due to have had their first vaccination by April 4th so that's a month behind the "leading" areas but encouraging nonetheless.
Schools open March 8th.
Most non-essential retail March 29th (in time for Easter so I will be bale to sit and snarl at other people at my favourite cafe in the Barking Road). I imagine race meetings may be able to have limited numbers in attendance from then as well. I suspect there will only be a token crowd for the National.
Pubs - where some PBers seem to want to spend every waking or indeed unconscious hour- seem to be the litmus test of normality. Table service could be on the 29th March but the "propping up of the bar" won't happen for a while.
The second great barometer of normality - the haircut - could be the 29th March but I suspect three weeks after that.
Tracking and tracing every single case won't help either. The combination of the infectiousness of Covid and the proportion of asymptomatic cases means that total suppression through tracking, tracing and isolation is an unrealistic goal - infections are always likely to leak out into other parts of the community even if you try to throw a cordon sanitaire around the known infected individuals and all their immediate contacts (caveat: Australia and New Zealand have successfully dealt with very small outbreaks with Draconian snap lockdowns covering entire cities, but they have moved heaven and Earth to try to stamp out the disease and keep it out whilst they wait to start mass vaccination - these measures would be wholly disproportionate in our very different circumstances.)
This doesn't mean that test, trace and isolate is useless, but I think that the current approach of keeping a lookout for problem variants popping up, and then concentrating on very localized surge testing and trying to keep the prevalence of those really low, is probably the right one. Minimizing the circulation of nasty new forms of the Plague, rather than desperately trying to wipe out every last chain of transmission, seems more realistic and achievable.
People are getting high either way. Better the £££ goes to Sunak than ganglords.
https://twitter.com/RobertJenrick/status/1363496312474382339?s=20
https://twitter.com/MayorofLondon/status/1363496685306077190?s=20
The other imponderable is the rate of vaccination worldwide. It's rare I agree with Boris Johnson but he's right to opine that once we have vaccinated their populations, the wealthier countries need to get to the vaccine to the poorer parts of the world.
The global economy functions best when the globe itself is open for business and countries/regions which remain closed due to insufficient vaccination impact everywhere else.
Told my other half I want to leave it 21 days till after my 1st vax before I head in
From what headteachers have seen on the testing regime being planned, they have already warned they can’t have all year groups back at once without a train wreck. So if they cut up rough and ultimately doom whatever he announce, he will have a nice new enemy to deflect Mark Harper towards.
https://www.tes.com/news/teachers-fear-reckless-full-8-march-school-openings
OTOH, she has built her reputation for handling the whole thing better on the back of cautious decisions.
There's every reason to suppose that she's concluded based on advice that there's probably little harm in letting a limited number of small children back into educational settings, though in practice there is risk attached to any decision and we don't know how big a chance her boffins have told her she's taking. We'll just have to wait and see I suppose.
EDIT: it's not just us, the Germans are clucking over the schools as well (and, unlike in the UK, their case load is already going up):
Germany’s health minister has called for caution as schools prepare to reopen this week despite a rise in the number of coronavirus cases.
“The virus isn’t making it easy for us,” Spahn told German broadcaster ARD. “We’re seeing that the numbers are climbing again. That’s annoying, and it brings back some uncertainty. That’s why caution, testing and vaccinating must continue to guide our path.”
The country has seen a recent slight rise in cases after a partial lockdown, imposed in mid-November, brought down infections. The rise has been attributed to the more transmissible variant first detected in the UK.
Schools and daycare centres are set to reopen in 10 German regions from Monday, with restrictions like mask-wearing in classrooms and ventilation planned.
Spahn said a balance has to be struck between protecting Germans from the risks posed by new, more infectious virus strains and the necessity for children to have some kind of “normal daily life”.
He said the effect of schools reopening will be monitored closely.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/feb/21/coronavirus-live-news-australia-begins-vaccine-rollout-israel-says-pfizer-jab-96-effective
However, we are not like those post war peasants who took rationing on the chin. Just think back to last summer's holiday destination gamers. They needed a foreign holiday, and if they didn't get one, they will be doubly keen to book this year.
I can think of several candidates to make the first try...
"Ah, fuck it, do what you like...."
Contrarian?
I think she is probably making the right call given current levels in Scotland, but I think she also may need to be realistic about how many staff will have to be off isolating/shielding at any given point, which will be disruptive.
That’s also true for England, of course.
Something is not right there.
That seems excessive.
Citation needed.
His mother wasn't impressed as she lived over 250 miles away.
He never did live that down.
The point about vaccinations is that it pushes the number of people who can be infected down, and therefore quashes R. Once you have herd immunity, then absent some super variant, there is no room for an imported case to spread.
Now, we clearly need to be careful about said super variants. But watch Israel, their borders (thanks to being a religious hub) are opening up come mid-March (and are already open if you want to go to a wedding or Bah Mitzvah).
If no variants get a hold there after two months of a vaccinated people and open borders, then we can be increasingly comfortable they're not going to arrive.
Just as you can be insufficiently cautious, you can attempt to manage every single risk, and do more harm.
Cases are going up yet schools are going back. Madness.
(that said despite the high positivity rate the ONS estimates still have Scotland with a lower infection rate than England)
I need to get a new passport, but forget it if I have a reminder of THIS hair for ten years!
And for National Trust B&B - are there many of those?
And still time for @MarqueeMark to set up Moth Glamping.