[sonotmyname]

Woohoo - more inconsistent and unscientific policies!

* Restaurants can continue to offer delivery for food, but takeaway alcohol will be banned

__ So alcohol spreads COVID? Good thing restaurants don't count on alcohol sales to stay afloat.

* Amateur team sports are not allowed, but elite sport such as Premier League football can continue

__ 'Elite' athletes, as is the case for the rest of the 'elites', should not have to follow the same rules as the plebs.

* Outdoor sports venues - such as golf courses, tennis courts and outside gyms - must close

__ Yeah - let's take a game (golf) that's done outdoors, in groups of 4 or less, and ban it. Don't worry - you're allowed to walk around the exact same golf course for excercise (as that's one of the only reasons you can leave your home), but if you have to swing a club you'll catch COVID.

[waterglassFull]

"__ So alcohol spreads COVID? Good thing restaurants don't count on alcohol sales to stay afloat."

The problem isn't the take-away alcohol itself, the problem is what people do with it.

We routinely get people around our area (East London) who buy take-away beer - stand two meters away from the pub - and drink it with their friends. It promotes people spreading COVID.

The UK government aren't confident enough to actually curtail people's behaviour (eg mask wearing in public, fining people etc) that they stop the things that people inherently do.

I don't think it's a great policy, but it's a step in the right direction.

The science itself is all in the messaging and tone.. but they make it easy to get out of with "valid reasons". Stay home.

[monksy]

That's kind of (rolls eyes on pure practical sense) how Chicago is handling this.

Our liqour sales are banned after 9pm from stores, and bars are able to do carryout|outdoor (we have some Canadian spies that live here.. so outdoor dining is still a thing [It's 0C or below on average right now.. chill it's a joke]) until 11pm.

My best guess for the store liqour sales is that the southside used liqour stores as a bar and would congregate outside, also the limitation of store liquor sales limits people going to impromptu parties.

Behavior change is hard to do right, but it also can be changed in completely unrelated but minor inconvenced changes. (I.e. changing a process or labeling may be more effective than a control and punish model) It's also very difficult to communicate for free societies on why a restuarant or bar ban still needs to be in place when the black market succeeds [underground raves/parties etc]. (Sigh "studies that claim most of the transmission in a household vs bars" (well where did that household interact with a different household... ))

[toolz]

There isn't any science there, just conjecture from the government on how their restrictions will alter social behavior. It's rather mind blowing to me after seeing extremely well funded and massive projects like the war on drugs in the U.S. fail, to now where the government thinks it can successfully push society in the right direction with even more drastic measures.

[f6v]

> So alcohol spreads COVID?

This always gets me. Isn’t it obvious that alcohol consumption is a social activity? Not all of it, but to a large degree. Limiting the consumption seems logical. Of course, you can’t assess the impact of individual measures at the moment, as you need a controlled experiment and proper statistics. But is this measure really something to be that upset about?

[dahfizz]

If you want high compliance, the rules need to be perceived as fair and just. Telling people they can't have beer with their dinner is plainly frustrating.

Not to mention that people can just get their takeaway from the restaurant, and then walk next door to the corner store and go "food shopping" to pick up a 6 pack.

If there was evidence that drinking alcohol spreads covid, I would expect that to be a clear message from the government and for there to be consistent restrictions on alcohol. Instead, we get silly rules with silly workarounds.

[alexchamberlain]

I for 1 am very glad about this. I accept this is just personal experience, but between Christmas and New Year - having not seen our families to prevent the spread of COVID - my wife and I were rather indignant to find large groups of people gathering outside the pubs of Greenwich all serving "take away" alcohol.

[woadwarrior01]

On a tangential note, there's a clinical trial[1] currently underway for exploring the use of alcohol vapor inhalation (with aspirin) as a potential treatment for COVID-19.

[1]: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04554433

[rusk]

You can measure it [0]. It has been measured. Contact tracing, where it has been done reliably has shown that a large amount of community transmission takes place at house parties where people have been drinking. You wouldn’t know that in the UK unfortunately because you’re never given any information beyond assurances that grit and determination will get together through.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...

[gnusty_gnurc]

> Limiting the consumption seems logical.

Lots of "plans" seem logical and this is precisely why technocracy is a vexation on society.

Unintended consequences. The presumption of knowledge and control.

All of these elite presumptions are illusory and fundamentally hubristic.

You know why "limiting the consumption" of alcohol is a dumb suggestion? We have tons of evidence that it was a massive failure: Prohibition and the War on Drugs.

No matter how well-intended you are - it'll backfire and people will ignore it.

Humans are fundamentally social creatures. Millions of years of evolution have seared into their biology the instinct to be social.

The idea that we can force humans into acting against their fundamental instincts to socialize is folly. Not only folly - but abuse.

But seriously, it's bizarre. The obdurance of so-called experts set on working against the grain of every human instinct, as though that's likely to maximize the success of their plans.

[f6v]

> The idea that we can force humans into acting against their fundamental instincts to socialize is folly.

Do you really want to go down that road? Well, here we go: procreation is a fundamental human instinct. Do you want to legalize rape? Didn’t think so. You see how folly your argument is?

[gnusty_gnurc]

> Well, here we go: procreation is a fundamental human instinct. Do you want to legalize rape?

This is non-sequitur.

A better comparison is like legally enforcing abstinence to eradicate HIV.

If you can't get the idea that isolation is counter-intuitive to humans and damaging to their health and psychology, and therefore bound to be hard to get compliance, I'm not sure what to say.

This is why jail is jail. Isolation is unnatural. It's punishment. No one voluntary chooses this.

[f6v]

Individual’s comfort can’t be a number one priority in a times of crisis. Sitting at home in a digital age when video calling anyone in the world is absolutely free, it’s the least you can do. Also all the entertainment which is available nowadays. How hard can it be to make this sacrifice so that someone’s grandma doesn’t die?

> isolation is counter-intuitive to humans

20 million cities are counterintuitive, and so is math. We get by.

I’m not denying that what is asked from people is a huge sacrifice. But not the biggest sacrifice you can imagine. And it’s definitely manageable.

[matz1]

As if grandma even want to be in isolation in the first place.

My grandma would rather took the small risk of dying of covid to go outside, socialize with their friends and family.

[gnusty_gnurc]

> How hard can it be to make this sacrifice so that someone’s grandma doesn’t die?

This is where things go wrong.

You're shaming people for feeling natural human instincts to socialize.

As though it's selfish to not want to be locked in your house indefinitely.

There is a striking resemblance here of the tactics used by abusers and emotional manipulators.

> But not the biggest sacrifice you can imagine. And it’s definitely manageable.

That's a completely presumptuous personal view - for a very large and underappreciated segment of the population, the ongoing lockdown measures to combat coronavirus are absolutely devastating.

[djsumdog]

Tell that to my best friend in the UK who's Italian flatmate committed suicide back in March.

[Someone]

Takeaway alcohol sales run a real risk of alcohol consumption on the streets in the neighborhood of alcohol sellers. That, in turn, can easily lead to loose interpretation of social distancing rules.

The argument for allowing elite sports to go on typically is to give the population some distraction during lockdown (it’s a bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses)

As to golf: if you allow that, why wouldn’t a group of four people be allowed to kick a football around? Tennis be allowed?

Also, part of lockdown is the prevention of people mixing over longer distances. A local outburst of COVID-19 is bad, but if the infected move home over tens of kilometers (as, I guess, is quite normal for golf), you’re asking for a much bigger problem.

Having said that, it is safe to assume the government is far from an expert on what are the risky things to do. Nobody is.

[dahfizz]

This reminds me of how the Massachusetts governor closed hair salons and golf courses ... between the hours of 9:30 pm and 5 am. I'm sure ladies getting their hair done at midnight were the real super spreaders /s.

Honestly, its not hard to see how government's hypocrisy and inconsistency fuels conspiracy theories. Another example is the Massachusetts mask mandate that explicitly requires masks when nobody is near you. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt, that this is just to remove ambiguity and make enforcement easier. But its not hard to imagine the reaction of someone who is prone to tinfoil hatting when they are told they must always wear a mask outside, even if miles away from the nearest human.

[danans]

> * Restaurants can continue to offer delivery for food, but takeaway alcohol will be banned

Is restaurant takeaway alcohol even a thing in normal times in the UK?

In CA at least, the state temporarily removed the normal restriction on takeaway alcohol in order to help restaurants during lockdowns.

[bananapear]

Not sure if it’s really that common, but it’s a staple of Friday evenings at City firms if you have to stay late.

You order a meal via the corporate Deliveroo/Seamless etc., to the firm-paid limit and immediately call the restaurant and ask for beer of the same value to be delivered instead.

[CamouflagedKiwi]

No - but lots of places (particularly pubs) had started doing takeaway alcohol last year in order to have _some_ sales, there was some general restriction-lifting to help with that kind of thing.

There's of course not any evidence that it's a meaningful contributor to infection, but lockdown is such a crude tool that it's going to hit it regardless.

[monksy]

All states should have done that in the first 2 weeks. It's irritating to see the bible belt/NC wait 9 freaking months to now allow for take away alcohol.

It feels like the governments are:

1. Trying to limit the enforcement and severity of actions or

2. They don't know what they're doing. (Which creates more resistance)

[foota]

It does make sense imo to allow elite sports to continue while banning amateurs, there are relatively few elite players so the additional risk overall is low.

[gruez]

You can make the same argument for top level ministers. eg. "well it's fine for the PM and the cabinet to ignore lockdown directives because they're only 0.001% of the uk population"

It's still inconsistent, bad for PR, and puts the whole government into question.

[JohnCohorn]

I dislike sports, but I do see that making pro sports broadcasts continue could provide the entertainment needed for folks to be happier to stay inside their homes like they should.

[JohnCohorn]

“Why not let everyone else sports to stay healthy and strengthen their immune systems, as well as get outside (where it's warm enough) and get the vitamin D they need?”

I’m all for letting people be outside freely by themselves and in isolated social groups. I’ve spent huge amounts of time exercising in parks in the sun outside during this thing for the reasons you mention.

Team sports where you get a bunch of unrelated people together in one place breathing hard and folks probably socializing after the game afterward seems more problematic.

[monksy]

I love the fact that they're open and televising the fact that no fans are there. That really stops people from trying to pressure venues from "sneaking in".

[djsumdog]

Why not let everyone else sports to stay healthy and strengthen their immune systems, as well as get outside (where it's warm enough) and get the vitamin D they need?

Why should people who get paid a million get special treatment over those who are barely making it an unemployed? Being able to shoot some hoops seems more valuable for the 20 year old's mental health than watching some rich top-of-their class play in am empty stadium with cardboard cutouts.

[Daishiman]

Because everyone doing sports kind of defeats the purpose of social distancing.

[ACow_Adonis]

it's literally the same logic for why any individual or group can rationalise not following the rules.

/which is precisely why there shouldn't be these kinds of arbitrary exceptions.

[oarabbus_]

It has little or nothing to do with risk. Professional athletes make extraordinary sums of money, and some percentage of that is given to the government via taxes. Amateur sports generates little to no money; therefore, the government doesn't allow it.

See also: here in California, churches/synagogues/temples are closed, while liquor stores and marijuana shops are considered "essential businesses". Film crews are allowed to operate in mass numbers outdoors, but not distanced patio dining.

It seems pretty clear it's all about the $$$.

[rusk]

Alcohol spreads COVID. Not exactly ... but it breaks down social barriers and can cause people to be careless. If we had banned or at least curtailed alcoholic sales I can guarantee you probably the numbers would be half what they are now. A big problem is that once you close pubs clubs and other outlets then people start having secret house parties and these are very hard to police. I guarantee you, that even the best intentioned host will have a super spreader event on their hands before long. It doesn’t take many - 10 even to churn the virus among themselves and then head off home to give it to whomever is there.

I’m really sorry that you feel your rights are being curtailed, but what we are living through is hopefully a once in a lifetime event that if we could have just knuckled down at the start and endured some discomfort we would be pretty much over it by now.

So much for that “blitz spirit” all we hear is moan moan moan ...

[gruez]

>. If we had banned or at least curtailed alcoholic sales I can guarantee you probably the numbers would be half what they are now.

but that's not what's happening. You can still get beer by going to a physical store, you just can't have it delivered to your house.

[nickpp]

> if we could have just knuckled down at the start and endured some discomfort we would be pretty much over it by now

Didn’t we do just that in the spring?

[rusk]

You and I did maybe.

[djsumdog]

This is complete and total arbitrary nonsense. You're taking a conclusion and trying to walk back a path of logic to some type of justification.

Let's see this for what it is: arbitrary decisions that curtails the human rights of all human beings by politicians who are figuratively drunk with power. They are banning things for the common people while they leave their regions, have expensive $1k dinners for their political backers and ignoring all the rules they've imposed on the population. From Canada to California to the UK, we watch elected leaders ignore the bullshit rules they put on people, either because they think it doesn't apply to them or they've seen the numbers and know the risks are bullshit.

We're talking about a disease that's literally has over a 98% survival rate if you're under 55 (which causes people to spout more "long COVID" narrative media non-sense). 100 years from now, do you really think scholars will see 2020 and 2021 as anything other than the largest cast of mass hysteria to date?

Let's isolate the elderly and vulnerable, or anyone who wants to be isolated, and let the rest of the world evaluate their own risks again.

[JohnCohorn]

Hypocrisy of elected officials following measures doesn’t imply that the measures they’re imposing aren’t needed.

I agree there have been elements of mass hysteria in this thing, but at the moment we have real and present reasons for hysteria to be appropriate. The number of cases we have at once is overwhelming hospital capacity in many regions and all signs point to it getting much worse over the next month.

[djsumdog]

> The number of cases

Please research PCR and the amplification cycles. Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles and it's causing a lot of false positives. Cases should never be the number to use, fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated).

The way PCR is being used is insane and a lot of the numbers are just plain misleading to increase the amount of fear.

[JohnCohorn]

Sure cases as a metric has been overemphasized and unnecessarily increases fear. But the fact that that metric isn’t ideally measured or presented shouldn’t take away from the fact that the metrics that are most critical like hospital capacity are getting to frightening levels right now .

[pw201]

> Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles

This is misleading. The number of cycles used is irrelevant. Reference: https://virologydownunder.com/the-false-positive-pcr-problem... (from someone who has actually used PCR in research, as neither you nor I have).

> and it's causing a lot of false positives.

We can get an upper bound on false positives from ONS surveys over the summer, by assuming all their positives were false (prevelance was low then). At https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... the ONS says "We know the specificity of our test must be very close to 100% as the low number of positive tests in our study means that specificity would be very high even if all positives were false. For example, in the most recent six-week period (31 July to 10 September), 159 of the 208,730 total samples tested positive. Even if all these positives were false, specificity would still be 99.92%." (The false positive rate would then be 100% - 99.92% = 0.08 %). The ONS prevelance surveys are processed at a couple of the Lighthouse Labs which also do the Pillar 2 testing in the UK.

Can you explain why "false positives" go down among vaccinated patients?

> fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated)

Evidence for "many"? We have a couple of metrics for UK deaths from COVID: deaths within 28 days of a positive test, and root cause / contributing causes ("of" vs "with") on death certificates. These are imperfect in both directions (for example, some patients who die spend more than 28 days in hospital with COVID, meaning the 28 day metric undercounts them) but agree that the UK has seen around 70000 deaths of COVID.

[rusk]

Sorry but this is derived from actual contact tracing (not the UK where they haven’t really bothered but a culturally similar neighbour) - but of course you’re so outraged that’s what matters more.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...

This article is about 6 months old, and we’ve moved on even more since then. It’s so saddening to see so many bright people unable to keep up.

Tell me again about Sweden sad lol

[djsumdog]

Can you post a link on the evidence for contact tracking in the UK and the data analysis please? I genuinely want to see it.

Edit: the poster updated the post with an article rather than adding a comment. It wasn't there when I commented. Also an article from The Atlantic isn't data analysis.

[rusk]

Sorry. Ran out of comments. Wasn’t trying to engage with you though so much as flesh out my argument. Good Luck!

[iso1210]

A lot of it is virtue signalling, and that's not a bad thing if you want people to actually think "we're all in this together"

Young people can't play football, so rich old white men play golf or go grouse shooting

Premier league footballers don't care much if they're playing or not, but the average person wants to watch it on TV.

Food delivery is fine, but they don't want people buying alcohol and meeting on the street to drink with friends

[CodeGlitch]

I agree with you on the football thing, although the players will be getting regular tests, and the sport generates a tonne of cash.

The rest of it make sense to me. Your example of golf: the sport includes the whole social aspect (the golf club rooms etc). Remember they have to keep the rules simple.

Also allowing people to order alcohol to be delivered within the hour probably isn't the smartest!

[gregmac]

> Also allowing people to order alcohol to be delivered within the hour probably isn't the smartest!

Why? What is the difference vs someone who keeps a quantity on alcohol in their house (other than being exorbitantly more expensive)?

[CodeGlitch]

The same reason why we have limits of where and when you can buy alcohol - because it's a licensed drug.

Why are people confused about this?

[waterglassFull]

You can still buy alcohol in stores; by take-away this means in a ready-to-drink fashion.

Alcohol delivery to a house is fine unless you're assuming people are still having parties.

[monksy]

Limit the amouunt of pre-prepared alcohol that can be delivered to a house at one time. You shouldn't be an ondemand keg delivery at this point or delivering 2+ cases in one go.

Also part of the delivery portion of this is about supporting the pub/bar. Not the access to alcohol. (Otherwise you'd just go to the store)

[waterglassFull]

Yes, this would make sense.

[gruez]

>The rest of it make sense to me. Your example of golf: the sport includes the whole social aspect (the golf club rooms etc). Remember they have to keep the rules simple.

closing the clubhouse is hard?

[CodeGlitch]

So now the rule is:

"Golf clubs can open but the club house have to stay shut"

Then you have to think of all the other sports and possible places people can gather and make rules about those too. My point was that the rules have to be simple otherwise people won't read them.

[edoceo]

If England stopped football there'd be riots the next day.

[rusk]

You do realise that England stopped football before even the government got their shiz together?

[edoceo]

Clearly I did not. Been a lot to keep up with last few months.

[haunter]

They did back in the spring and there were no riots?