@nvk "If you said to me that short of a curfew you had to put more hours of restrictions on when you could get food, I would be perfectly comfortable with that,” he said"
WTF is this unscientific nonsense? How is making stores more crowded going to help?
They just can't admit that nothing they have the power to do will change much of anything.
@Zachary_BTC @nvk They did that in London too.
> WTF is this unscientific nonsense? How is making stores more crowded going to help?
This has been grinding my gears so much when I hear about govs limiting opening hours or even introducing curfews... In some places they *extended* opening times to allow people to spread out when they were coming, that's the right idea! I can even respect places where they dedicated the first few hours of grocery stores opening hours to the elderly and immunocompromised.
@pete @nvk To be fair that came at a time when it was key to take more aggressive measures and slow the spread, and look where the UK is now. Govs in general (from China to Europe to the Americas) waited too long to take action, so now we are stuck with way more invasive measures that aren't nearly as effective.
@pete I'd say it was taking too little action early on when it would have been more effective, and taking too much action later when it didn't help anymore anyway, just to appear not completely useless.
@kekcoin Again, that just doesn't make sense. Countries did in fact mostly crush it, fairly early. But they could not eliminate it. So by crushing it, they squandered a summer that could have been used to build up immunity.
Of course, all this assumes this currt covid wave is in fact real and we haven't fucked up testing with false positives... Unfortunately that is still a possibility. Certainly some meaningful minority are false positives.
@pete I'm not convinced they "crushed" it as much as they kept it really fucking close to what the medical apparatus could handle, which is risky in and of itself as your data is likely an incubation time outdated wrt reality as to the infection rate, and the spreading rate is exponential. Trying to ride that edge is really risky when people have a much higher fatality rate without treatment.
@kekcoin They crushed it. Hospitals were pretty empty in most places. That's just a fact.
@pete Not sure what you are calling dumb, but I agree with that - what I remember from the UK's herd immunity stance was not to take any, or take way too little action to flatten the curve, rather let it just run wild instead.
@kekcoin To be clear, you're criticising that?
Because that plan was the right idea. At this point a double digit % of the UK have certainly been infected. The only question was how to get there. Delaying herd immunity back in March just made the final dramatic rise overhelm hospitals in some areas. Had they spread that out over more time by not locking down early they'd have been better off. That's just the reality of the science.
@pete It's not entirely clear to me how much of their current surge is caused by the new variant, how much of it is caused by different weather conditions, etc. But mutations are chance based - the more people have the virus, the higher the chance a new strain emerges. It's like people are the miners for the virus.
@kekcoin The variant was most likely caused by antibody therapy. Quite likely more than once. The obvious, sane, strategy of protecting vulnerable and allowing youth to get infected wouldn't have caused that problem. It's also not clear that it's actually any different, as it isn't consistently spreading faster. Post-hoc analysis will find outliers by random chance.
Again, were getting to herd immunity whether you like it or not.
@pete Let's hope so... I.o.w. let's hope a variant doesn't pop up that defies the immunity from the current variant.
@kekcoin it's very rare for diseases to do that. Same reason why vaccine resistance is almost unheard of.
@nvk "He said that banks, which were shutdown in the early spring, could also be closed to the public given the capabilities of electronic banking."
No-one goes into a bank unless they have too. Shut them down and someone's getting screwed over, probably poor people.