[gns24]

I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is. During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in Kent; whilst case counts were dropping in the rest of the country, they continued to rise significantly there. Something was clearly different.

Now high case counts are spreading from the South East into the rest of the country. We don't know whether we can even stop the growth. During the last lockdown schools remained open; I suspect that it may be necessary to close them in order to just stop the growth. A significant reduction in cases looks impossible.

This strain has probably already spread to tens of other countries. Every country which is just about holding things together, whatever their strategy, is going to struggle with a significantly more transmissible variant of the virus.

[LatteLazy]

I don't disagree, but it would be really nice if we could classify lockdowns better. The original lockdown furloughed a LOT of workers, closed schools and closed virtually all shops. Today's "super tier 4+ lockdown" doesn't seem to apply to shops at all (my local shops were all open this morning, is wrapping paper really an "essential"?). Workers are mostly going in. Schools that have remained open unless they already closed and childcare is still running.

They've basically just shut restaurants. That's the only change I can see...

I've posted elsewhere that my cynical view of the UK gov approach is that they are talking tough and doing nothing. So maybe I'm biased?

Perhaps a move transmissible strain will force real action?

[detritus]

On my walk to work this morning, I detoured down a local main street, curious to see what shops were considering themselves 'essential' and remaining open.

Apparently this time around, travel agents and jewellery sellers have added themselves to the list, with a few barbers clearly operating illicitly behind half-drawn shutters.

I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd be staying open when I enquired on Saturday evening. I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is!

Bluntly, without the sincere threat of fines or whatever, no action will be taken. UK-dwellers' sense of entitlement to 'freedoms' seems drastically diluted compared to what I witnessed on the continent a few months back, when I was able.

We deserve everything we get.

- ed, whups - clearly I meant something like 'drastically inflated', not 'diluted'.

[shalmanese]

> I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd be staying open when I enquired on Saturday evening. I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is!

Let's not repeat the mistakes of the first lockdown. If you close down too many places, all that causes is everyone cramming into the same few places still open, causing superspreader events. At one point, LA shut down outdoor farmers markets and many cities including London slashed their public transit schedules, leading to overpacked busses and trains.

[motohagiography]

In the march/april stage of the pandemic, I chose to shop at such "shi-shi" places exclusively because a) there were no lineups, b) their non-frozen supply chain meant they had to sell meat or it would rot, c) they were owned by people with families in the neighbourhood/city, and d) the higher prices kept out hoarders, panic buyers, and the mentally ill.

On the last point, there was almost always some psycho causing problems in the regular supermarket because it appealed to their sense of drama and got them attention. The extra %15-20 was worth avoiding the risk of an altercation.

The contempt some people have for local shopowners who provide services that are actually worth a premium is shocking, albeit typically british.

[detritus]

I assume not, but if your final sentence was aimed at my tongue-in-cheek appraisal of the value of chi-chi delis (which, obviously, i was shopping in) during a pandemic, then please appreciate that I also today spent 35 minutes waiting in a queue for a local butcher and over the past months have been highly appreciative of my local Turkish-run mini-market.

I'm not sure I do think it's a British thing to hate on local shopowners, if anything - the opposite, what with us being a nation of them, and all.

Sure major Supermarkets have captured most of the spend, but that's just the way things are. Convenience comes in different forms.

[ytwySXpMbS]

Not addressing your main points, but that is a seriously prejudiced view of people struggling with mental illness. Mentally ill people aren’t “psychos”, many people in all walks of life struggle with anxiety, depression or something else. That’s not to say violent people don’t have underlying mental health issues. It’s quite an outdated view that mentally ill people are distinct from “normal” people, and aren’t just people who’ve suffered trauma. What happens if you find yourself dealing with these issues, are you going to shame yourself into not seeking treatment?

[motohagiography]

During a public emergency with uncertainty like the beginning of the pandemic, a person who becomes physically aggressive in a supermarket, makes a point of coughing and spitting on shelves and aisles, and threatens the cashiers and stock staff everyone else depends on, because they want to provoke a confrontation that makes them feel powerful - does not earn sympathy.

Equating people experiencing depression with those who have violent delusions and borderline tendencies creates a worse stigma on seeking treatment than recognizing that dangerous people are just plain dangerous. Sure, we're all people etc, but in an emergency, there are men and women you can trust, and there are ones you can't. A psycho is someone who threatens or harms others for gratification, and it is an epithet they earn. If that's "prejudiced," perhaps we're just from different cultures.

The stakes change when there was a reasonable threat that their actions could put people and their families at risk.

[howlgarnish]

You're attacking a straw man of your own invention here. In casual use (like above), "psycho" means somebody acting in a bizarre or dangerous manner, eg. trying to buy all the toilet paper in the store and not taking "no" for an answer. Nothing to do with actual mental illness.

Obviously the etymology of the term comes from psychological illness via a certain famous Hitchhock movie, and that's one reason why the term du jour these days is "Karen" instead.

[dehrmann]

The way things were announced in the UK, they just set up for what India did: a no-notice lockdown that causes people to disperse on crowded trains. Oops.

[gorgoiler]

Am I right in saying that the goal of any lockdown is not to completely stop the spread of the virus, but to instead merely keep hospitals from filling up?

The health of the population, in general, is not the primary concern. We just need to stop the hospitals from collapsing.

We live with all manner of sickness and disease every day of the year without trying to eradicate them. Covid is only different from heart disease, lung cancer, and rabies in that it has the potential to swamp us.

Adjusting the throttle for spread might mean jewelry shops being open but sandwich shops being closed. It might just as well involve lockdown for anyone born in an odd month, or with a name ending in a vowel, or ginger hair. The measures are arbitrary and only used as a throttle for the inevitable spread.

This is how I sleep at night. The alternative is the worrying thought that no one in power really knows what they are doing.

[graeme]

Lockdown had a variety of goals but the current situation can generally be classed as a policy failure. Hospital collapse is the worst case scenario but isn’t the only goal. Other important goals include:

* keeping schools open (mostly a success)

* avoiding economic disruption (mixed, tending towards failure)

* avoiding unnecessary deaths and long run health issues (failure)

* Avoiding a second lockdown and the related uncertainty and stress (failure)

* returning to normal life (failure)

* avoiding dangerous mutations (failure)

The UK is an island and could have fairly easily done a NZ/Australia strategy over the summer when seasonality made elimination easy. Jurisdictions that made that choice are doing better on all front.

I live in one such jurisdiction (atlantic canada) and we’ve spent less time in lockdown, had a good economy, and mostly avoided deaths and hospitalizations. Seems a clear winner.

Perhaps a country in the middle of europe couldn’t have done it but the Uk certainly could have.

And no, this pretty clearly shows govts had no long run or even medium run strategy. Europe will be in rolling lockdowns till april or so, because of a premature declaration of victory in the summer.

[tibbydudeza]

It is way easier to leave the UK than it is to leave Australia/NZ - there are only the airways and no roads or ferries.

[graeme]

Ireland was interested in doing covid zero, but the uk wasn’t, other than scotland.

So once you exclude ireland, you have the channel tunnel, and a handful of ferries to france/belgium. All of which arrive at terminals and where you can do tests or register people for isolation requirements.

Australia and nz aren’t the only successes. You also have taiwan and vietnam. Very close to china, and vietnam has land borders. The biggest difference is these countries tried.

[wonnage]

The West simply has not demonstrated the ability to enact an actual lockdown. So we're stuck with these half-measures, that rely on minimum-wage store greeters for enforcement, and even those get protested.

[jnxx]

> Am I right in saying that the goal of any lockdown is not to completely stop the spread of the virus, but to instead merely keep hospitals from filling up?

The lockdown in New Zealand had that goal to stop it completely, and achieved it.

Also, it is in general not impossible to eradicate a contagion and suppress it completely. For example, this was done with smallpox, which is about as transmissible SARS-COV2. Smallpox has been eradicated world-wide, for a quite modest price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication

[jmnicolas]

> UK-dwellers' sense of entitlement to 'freedoms'

Seriously?

We (the West, I'm not from the UK) are losing our freedom at an unimaginable speed even a few years ago and you think freedom is negotiable? I find this appalling how easy we ease into a dictatorship everywhere in Europe.

[LatteLazy]

It's interesting that no one seems to give a shit about real freedoms like free speech or democracy, detention without trial or access to lawyers. But when you close the pubs (or the artisnal pasta makers), suddenly we're on a dictatorship.

[jmnicolas]

This is so unjust: you don't know me but you basically reduce me to an angry guy that can't get drunk with his friends.

ALL our freedoms are attacked: the social media censorship reached crazy levels lately, and let's not talk about democracy given the disgusting spectacle the US has shown this year (my country doesn't fare any better).

When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship.

As I said I'm not from the UK but as far as I know people in London had more freedom during the WWII aerial bombings.

[jacobsenscott]

There was never a "freedom to post" on social media, so you haven't lost that. The idea of "freedom of speech" was formed during a period of time when there were natural barriers to speech such that bat shit crazy qanon conspiracy theories and other such nonsense couldn't propagate widely. Nobody ever intended "freedom of speech" to equal a right to use a frictionless machine to propagate lies to billions.

Prior to the internet you could for the most part visually distinguish between the crazy and the legitimate - the crazy was in crayon on cardboard scraps, full of misspellings. The higher quality crazy was type written on a misaligned sheet of paper, thick with whiteout, still full of misspellings. The legit was professionally edited and published. Not 100% of the time, but a good fraction of the time.

Now we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and blog services like medium that make everything look really really good. That visual heuristic is gone. We need a way to invert our current equilibrium of "it is easy to get bad information out, and hard to get good information out" at least back to how it was: "it is hard to get good information out, but it is even harder to get really bad information out." That isn't censorship.

As for democracy in the US, as a US citizen I can tell you it is on the ropes, mostly due to social media, but it is better off today than it was four years ago just because people are at least starting to think about how to get social media under control.

Every freedom my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had I have, and more. I'm hard pressed to identify a single one that is under attack.

[djur]

So far the outcome of the "disgusting spectacle" in the US has provided evidence against the risk of incipient dictatorship, not for it. States mobilized to various degrees of success to enable voting despite the pandemic, and the result was the highest turnout since 1900.

And you should really familiarize yourself with the actual government response in the UK and US during World War II. The censorship regime was extensive, far more so than anything we've seen in recent memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship

Furthermore, rationing of food, fuel, and other commodities was extensive. In the UK, this included substantial control of the operating hours, prices, and even the menus of restaurants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...

[onion2k]

When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship.

On the other hand, people are actually dying of Covid. Given the choice I'd take financial ruin over death.

[detritus]

During Rationing, you mean?

[tinus_hn]

In the Netherlands, although not in every city, in some COVID-19 is an excuse for banning demonstrations.

[switch007]

It was made law in the UK

[detritus]

Hence my enclosing Freedoms in single quotes.

I tend to communicate quite drily - that's often hard to put across online.

[LatteLazy]

I think you're exactly correct.

It drives me nuts when people talk about freedom, they have no actual idea what freedom is or takes and their actions undermine it. Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I like with no consequences", but that's what people really want.

Freedom is just a better sounding word than selfishness these days :(

<Steps-down-from-soapbox>

[im3w1l]

To many people democracy is just a means to an end. And the end goal is a simple life with simple pleasures.

[adwww]

Re the deli and other quasi essential shops, it would seem unfair if they closed when you can still buy your fancy cheese and olives in a supermarket.

[LatteLazy]

The issue isn't really whether that shop is essential. The issue is that the greeting card store next door is also open, because they've decided they're essential. And none of these stores (including the super market) is enforcing mask requirements because none of the others are and they don't want to be the only one.

In 1000 little steps you are suddenly miles away from a real lockdown. You're basically BAU, but the pub is shut ever other week (unless you buy a scotch egg in which case it is also essential).

I don't care if people are eating gourmet olives. But we need to realise that making excuses for doing nothing is still doing nothing.

[Izkata]

It's essential to the owners or their employees, who may risk losing their home if they can't make a living.

Lockdowns have gone on long enough that people are deciding to risk it because they have far more pressing concerns.

[tonyedgecombe]

I don't know why you expect it to be fair. The policy needs to be effective first and foremost. Schemes like furlough are there to support people who are most affected.

[Ichthypresbyter]

> I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is!

I suppose we could close all food shops other than Asda, and restrict Asda to selling only their most basic range (and no sweets, chocolate, fizzy drinks, etc- after all, you can survive without those). On the other hand, that would mean that Asda would be more crowded as people who normally shop in your "chi-chi local middle class deli" now have to go there.

[Doctor_Fegg]

The chance of transmission in a small, quiet deli is significantly less than in a crowded supermarket. Several older residents in our town have switched from the Co-op to the local deli for exactly that reason. Unless you’re going to start deeming what food is essential and what isn’t, then your distinction is counter-productive.

[lol768]

> I've posted elsewhere that my cynical view of the UK gov approach is that they are talking tough and doing nothing. So maybe I'm biased?

It's felt like this with all of the tiers to be honest.

They just don't go far enough and the populace is fed up with taking much heed of the rules too.

The November "lockdown" felt very, very different to March when the roads etc were quiet - and it actually felt like people were taking this seriously.

[LatteLazy]

I have to be careful I don't wander into conspiracy theories but...

I'm fed up because so many people flout the rules with no consequences. I suspect that the lack of consequences is intentional. If everyone flours the rules, the economic hit will be smaller and Bojo can claim he did something and its not his fault no one listened. The government have created a situation where the only logical action for normal people is business as usual, that means large excess deaths, and the government has plausible deniability. Whoops.

/RantAndParanoia

[iso1631]

> I'm fed up because so many people flout the rules with no consequences.

Been that way since Barnard's Castle.

The latest decision that says MPs can see their siblings for Christmas Dinner on the 25th, but a Nurse working on the 25th can't see their parent with terminal cancer for dinner on the 26th, will hopefully be ignored.

[londons_explore]

What's especially funny is the latest Tier 4 Health Protection legislation has a specific exception for groups meeting in the grounds of castles...

I can't believe it hasn't made headlines yet...

[switch007]

I think it’s existed longer? I remember reading some legislation during the November lockdown thinking that the Gov is trolling us.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> If everyone flours the rules, the economic hit will be smaller

Only assuming that there's no economic hit to a rampant pandemic spreading death, hospitalisation and illness. Which is a barking mad assumption. It never was "illness vs economy" you either have both good, or you have neither good. They can't be separated.

[konjin]

The people dying from the virus are the old, sick and fat. Not a population that adds much to the economy.

Depending on long term health effects if covid runs wild you can see as many benefits to average people at the end of it as you did after the black death.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> The people dying from the virus are the old, sick and fat.

It's not that simple. It's never that simple: i.e. you have simplified to the point of being flat wrong.

> Depending on long term health effects if covid runs wild you can see as many benefits to average people at the end of it as you did after the black death

I don't know what you mean there, for one thing prevalent Long COVID is really not going to be net benefit, for another you should perhaps rethink your economic argument for genocide / decimation. And your assumption about who is "in groups" / "average people" vs out groups. Your whole line of thinking is lacking in both logic and human decency.

[simonbarker87]

There was a decent drop in cases in November from what I can see. You’re right though, the first lock down felt very different.

Sadly the rules are laxer than they should be but the government can’t enforce the rules effectively so are putting in enough grey-area that people can sort of decide for themselves.

Sadly people are very short term focussed and unable to make the most of the situation and instead complain and go about their normal lives with just enough changes that they “feel like they’re doing their bit”.

I love the gym but the move to “keep gyms open” was the best example of people not really getting it and being sad that their toys had been taken away.

The moto in our hose at the moment is “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”

[sgt101]

People are very short term focused on things like; not losing their houses, not losing their businesses, maintaining their families, maintaining their mental health, looking after children.

I don't know your situation, but I have lived a very isolated existance for the last 9 months because I am able to. MANY people I know are not in this position.

[bealesd]

Couldn't agree more. People who have already isolated in previous lockdowns, and lost income, probably can't afford to play it safe. Expecially if they percieve the risk of Covid to be less than the financial risk of playing it safe.

[simonbarker87]

I wasn’t referring to things people HAVE to do to survive - I’m talking about stuff they don’t have to do but want to do because they “just want to be back to normal”

[sgt101]

Schools were still open, and building sites - which made a very significant difference to movement and traffic.

However, if you look at the graphs the dynamic of virus growth did seem to be significantly changed by the intervention.

[oli5679]

Citymapper mobility index is quite interesting for quantifying level of lockdown.

https://citymapper.com/cmi/london

[mercer]

As a programmer / software engineer, I've found that I often look for equivalency with policy and whatnot, because it seems like there are lots of similarities.

The impression that I get from my country (The Netherlands) is that we are doing a bit better than the UK for reasons that nobody quite understands yet. The best I can guess is that we ultimately make 'bigger' choices comparatively, even though compared to many other EU countries we're not doing particularly well despite being one of the richer ones.

The way I see it, our country is run by technocrats who are faced with something very different and new. Like with projects I've worked on as a programmer, the best solution often involved going way off course. And like with projects I've worked on, this usually didn't happen.

Solutions were conservative, even if something more drastic seemed prudent to almost everyone involved. It's really fucking hard to rewrite some of the core code. So instead we address things further away from that core with all sorts of special cases.

If anything, the pandemic has shown that our current way of doing things isn't quite equipped to deal with big upsets, and considering the future this is something we should probably prioritize dealing with somehow.

[flukus]

I feel like a lockdown rating system to compare what various countries and states are doing would be helpful to those outside. Something like +1 for closed retail, +1 for closed schools, +3 when outdoor exercise isn't allowed, +0.5 for recommending WFH, etc. So many times you hear on the news that x is in lockdown when they really aren't.

[oliwarner]

It was only a lockdown in name. Schools were in. Shops were open. Ministers have even been supplying pubs with methods to skirt the rules (scotch eggs ffs).

Not saying it's not bad, just that very little is actually being done to prevent the spread. Govt care more about keeping people in work.

[iso1631]

Yet it worked well. In Cheshire (not badly hit), daily cases halved between the start of lockdown and end, having doubled in the previous month. In Cumbria it was even more of a drop

Overnight covid paitents in the NW went from a peak above that of April in Mid November (i.e. had caught it in October), dropping to 70% of the peak a month later, same in NE+Yorks.

[oliwarner]

The efficacy of action is directly related to your starting density. That is to say a mild lockdown is effective on a sparse caseload.

But there were places where one in a hundred was a contagious carrier. Stay at home was the only thing that would worked well. They're still not at that point, plans are still to return schools in T4 and as others testify, most shops ignore the rules. It's shambolic.

[lbeltrame]

> I think most people seem to be underestimating just how bad this is.

No, there is no reason to panic yet. Concern, perhaps, but not panic.

There are a truckload of confounding factors in the middle, including potential "founder effects" (when a variant becomes dominant because it is the first to take hold, and just outruns the others out of larger starting numbers).

There is not yet solid proof of "70% more transmissible" given that all the data there are is the SAGE meeting minutes. We don't know from where the data came from, and how the estimations were made. There are huge uncertainties.

Until the biological analyses are done, one needs to keep their cool. Sadly, that wasn't what the UK government did.

[gns24]

Founder effects don't explain why this new strain took over as the dominant strain in London.

Even if we suppose the chance of it being as bad as suggested is only 50%, we should panic now, rather than waiting until we have solid proof and risk having a public health disaster.

Personally I suspect the UK didn't panic in its announcement and that this situation had been under surveillance for some weeks.

[lbeltrame]

The confidence intervals go as low as 37% and as high as ~120%. That's a load of uncertainty.

Also the latest document by PHE highlights also the limitations of the current data behind modeling (PCR negative for the S gene, but positive for the others). At this point the good questions haven't been answered yet.

[fsh]

Without proper statistical analysis and epidemiological modelling this is nothing more than an anecdote. The last twelve months should really have taught us not to trust those.

[kashprime]

It's fortunate that Pfizer/BioNTech chose the whole spike protein mRNA as their vaccine candidate over the one that focused just on the receptor binding domain -- which the UK mutation changed. Wise choice, and hopefully it will work well against this new variant. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906

Moderna's vaccine was focused on the whole spike protein too. So even though there are crucial mutations in this mutation, both leading vaccine candidates hopefully will still be effective.

[stubbedtoe]

For those interested in looking at the raw data, https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map is a useful visualisation of cases by region, over time.

[saberdancer]

I am not from UK but I think this is an important and critical information. How is the daily deaths chart in Kent and London?

Deaths will be visible later on than infections but by now there should be a visible effect if IFR/CFR is different. If there is no visible difference it's possible that R0 increased while IFR remains steady (which is bad enough).

[jnxx]

> This strain has probably already spread to tens of other countries. Every country which is just about holding things together, whatever their strategy, is going to struggle with a significantly more transmissible variant of the virus.

Yes. If the new variant is duplicating every week even under medium lock-down measures, as it appears, it will be very difficult to contain it, and impossible with the current set of measures. It would require a very strict lock-down at least. And the vaccinenes would not yet help - they will help later but probably not before late Summer, while the new variant will very likely be all over Europe until March.

Thinking about what we know, what appears very likely, and the conclusions of it, the first half of the year will be far away from normal, even catastrophic.

[numpad0]

I think what most people has is issues with resolving double binds; there’s only one way out and it’s hard lockdown with rationing, which kind of require willful sacrifices, of jobs to say super least.

The general public anywhere isn’t ready for trolley problems even if told to optimize for least body counts. Basically the whole free world is in disbelief of the story that there are people on tracks(except TW/AU/NZ?).

[dehrmann]

> We don't know whether we can even stop the growth

I think extreme lockdown measures could, but they'd almost have to be indefinite, and there's no appetite for that.

[Shorel]

>During the last lockdown schools remained open

Honestly, that doesn't sound like a real lockdown at all.

[ryandrake]

People really need to stop using the l-word. It grossly overstates what's happening. They called it that here in the USA too, and it was just as ridiculous. We had these so-called Stay At Home orders, which had tons of exceptions and were both ignored by the population and unenforced by the government. They might as well have been called Stay At Home Suggestions.

An actual sustained lock-down would likely stop the virus's spread, allowing us to finally get back to normal. But nobody wants to claim ownership of the economic fallout, so instead they do these half-assed lock-downs which don't really accomplish much besides making the government look like they're doing something.

[hammock]

>During the recent 4-week lockdown it was already clear that something odd was going on in Kent; whilst case counts were dropping in the rest of the country, they continued to rise significantly there. Something was clearly different.

They said the same thing about overnight vote counts in Fulton County, GA... turns out it was nothing.