*pubs that serve food
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
I think the UK seems to have done a really bad job even by comparison with most other nations, most of who haven't been very good at all. A good leader like they have in NZ takes hearts and minds with them. BoJo just bumbles through, doesn't even rebuke his main adviser for flouting the law and then expects everyone else to guess what he means and comply if they guess right. It doesn't breed cooperation.
I don’t know if anyone knows exactly how big a role they play. As the CMO keeps saying household transmission is the main driver but the virus has to get into the household somehow. Our contact tracing system is completely overwhelmed and not able to work out where each case first got infected. There’s so many unknowns right now. We’re in a really tough spot.
I don't know what to believe anymore really and I'm just going along with the ride at this stage. Some corners say we're totally overreacting with our far more restrictive measures than most European countries, some say we're not reacting enough, others say the economy will be ruined, that we don't have the money for it, that we'll lose more lives indirectly than directly, who fecking knows really? You do have to wonder how the only island state in the EU (and a sparsely populated one at that) has made such a complete balls of things that they want to go and lockdown again, OR, are we being completely ridiculous even thinking about locking down for a second time? Again, feck knows, but it's all a bit shite.
But now NPHET are on about basically cancelling Christmas and god help them and the government if they do anything like that!
This is skewed by huge outbreaks at universities? And places like food factories?
The thing is, every country in Europe is in the shit right now. To me it just seems like this is an unsolvable problem in a region where open boarders and freedom of travel are prioritised so highly, yet countries are all taking different approaches to viral suppression.
We might be an island but we both know there’s a land border on this island and its the border counties that are getting hammered by the virus most of all.
I only saw it when Wibble posted, hadn't realised it was so long ago!! Doh.
just to answer your questions - Mooloolaba and no, they have no right to do what they want I'M the boss.
Awesome. The Sunshine Coast is a great place to live. And now covid free.
One of the few places I could see myself living other than Sydney and Perth/WA. Plus it isn't too bad for work (in my field) so it would be vaguely possible to live there before retirement.
Last edited:
I lived in Mooloolaba for 6 months! I was working in Nambour General Hospital, just up the road. Nice place. Decent beaches.
Page 18 should explain the data further for you, it isn't skewed by universities. Most of the cases are coming from primary and secondary school settings (10 times greater than universities).
Food factories have cases, but not enough to skew the figures. Looking at the data, the workplace increases looks to correlate with schools going back.
But not a patch on the Costa Del Toowoomba?
Does anybody know of any studies that have estimated the number of people who have been infected in the UK (ie. not just tested positive)?
Very difficult to determine this unless you have mass antibody testing.
This combines all of the different studies done to try to answer that question - https://fullfact.org/health/19m-coronavirus-manchester/
I well remember the speech talking about sacrificing the pub for schools, and I think my reaction to it (like everyone else's) was 'well that's shit, but if that has to happen it has to happen'.
My issue is that now the data is in, it's clear it's not a 1 for 1 trade off, and I would argue it's questionable whether it is even possible at all to have schools open and pretend like we are still attempting to control the virus. Maybe it is possible, at the expense of literally everything else (including most workplaces where it is impossible to WFH), but that seems like something that at the very least needs to be publicly debated, and if it's not possible, which strongly seems to be what the data is indicating, then we need to see the modelling and we need to know what the projected death tolls are going to be as a result of it spreading rapidly again. If we, as a society, decide having schools open is worth that price then so be it.
As the government has absolutely no appetite to do either of those things, it really pisses me off that you get this faux moralising (which a lot of people in this thread have fallen for) that the spread of coronavirus is somehow a failure of personal responsibility. As if if we'd all agreed to not have one extra pint, or if 2% more of the population wore masks more effectively, we'd still be on top of it. It's the exact same bollocks as global warming: it's going to make feck all difference if you put your Muller Fruit Corner in the correct bin when the government are approving new coal mines, greenlighting fracking, and working hand in hand with BP, so it's galling to see idiots like Robert Jenrick arguing things like 'it is commonsensical (fecking sic) that the longer you stay in pubs and restaurants, the more likely you are to come into contact with other individuals' as proof that local lockdowns aren't working and need to be more strict. Of course that's a factor, but why is that the debate when the stats suggest it is a tiny proportion of a tiny proportion of cases without ministers ever being questioned about whether local lockdowns might not be working because kids are still going to school in those areas, or that both Manchester universities have imported thousands of cases because the government refused to bail out the university sector and gave universities a very simply choice between becoming covid incubators or going bankrupt.
No one is going to argue that hospitality can happen with zero cases. Lockdown extremists will logically argue that we should not have them open at all. My position is simply that if you don't have schools open the evidence of the summer seemed to suggest you can have some degree of normality, and if you DO have schools open it's irrelevant whether those places are open or shut because you're not going to be able to keep a lid on case numbers anyway.
It's a difficult debate, for sure, I'm just frustrated that we're being cheerled back into fairly major restrictions on all of our lives, especially for those of us who don't live lives that conform to the expectations that you live with/have a close nuclear family unit, without much evidence to suggest it's going to have any effect whatsoever.
Felt like moving from hell to paradise.
Surely the other way to look at that is when community transmission was low and workplaces were less full, the covid secure measures weren't all that important, and when community transmission was high and they were really needed, it became clear that these covid secure measures were full of holes? The premise is that these measures "substantially reduce" the risk of transmission, so even if parents are bringing it back in, it shouldn't spread much. The figures don't seem to support that.
Agreed!
Whilst i absolutely agree that all restrictions need to be evidenced base. Where we don't have a body of evidence we really need to stop ignoring common sense and pretending it'll be fine.
This whole crisis has felt like a long journey of the science catching up to reality. It was obvious masks would help, that stadiums were an issue and that schools and workplaces would be hotspots for transmission. The list is endless.
Hospitality might be of little threat when cases are low but given that the growth in numbers is exponential then any area of transmission becomes a major cause of concern at higher levels. It's certainly not as simple as just looking at the main contributors.
The government's initial threat levels made a lot of sense but they've cocked up the communications and not been very honest about it.
Very fair comment
This is pretty pointless statistic. There are a lot more primary schools than unis and the clusters are smaller. Absolute numbers would be a lot better stat than number of clusters.
Edit: checked it and there are 21.000 primary schools and 142 unis in UK. So 150 times as many.
Last edited:
I went to a talk way back in March at the very start of all this. I remember an epidemiologist saying that in a pandemic you can’t always wait for strong scientific evidence before taking action. Think masks are a prime example of this. Not that I’m saying that science shouldn’t be central to policy, just that sometimes decisions need to be made without perfect evidence and need to able to change when we get better evidence.
Good point. Same proviso applies when comparisons of schools vs pubs/restaurants etc. In terms of numbers of people visiting each of those sites every day the pubs/restaurants will be a tiny % of the number of children in school.
Also, year groups and whole schools are being isolated at the first sign of a case. Schools are being controlled much more strictly than most other settings at the moment, because that's fairly easy to do. Trying to trace cases back to a particular pub or restaurant is much more difficult, particularly with the shortcomings of track and trace, so it's almost inevitable that they will have fewer confirmed clusters.
As the Irish WHO bloke said (can’t remember his name) “Perfect is the enemy of good”
A fraction of the visitors also means a fraction of the risk though.
Of course, I cannot just begin to pretend like I think it makes sense to invest the entirety of our energy and effort on what is shown to be a tiny area of transmission whilst ignoring areas that the data shows are massive problems.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that the balance between hospitality and schools was the other way round given the respective focus each is getting, and there doesn't seem to be much evidence in PHE's data to suggest that it's becoming a bigger issue as case loads increase elsewhere. That might change, and I'd be happy to change my opinion with the data as it emerges, but it just does not feel like we're targeting measures at the right things to get back on top of it.
And also a fraction of the disruption if those visitors have to visit less.
It’s all a complete shit show but as @Brwned points out, keeping schools open makes sense as a priority for society as a whole. Even if this is detrimental to other sectors.
I would like to see more open discussions about stuff like this. What are the priorities for society? Are we all on the same page about them? I think people will buy into restrictions better if they feel consulted.
Yeah I can see that point of view, but the ratio of incidents by institutions remain fairly consistent for the workplace. The big spike in wk39, with the spike of education incidents in wk38, would suggest that transmission has passed from kids to adults into the workplace. The difficulty with the data is that it's never going to be as granular as possible to find out the absolutes, but some broad conclusions can be made. I personally found fig 22 and 23 of the contact data for test and trace interesting.
As for covid secure measures, talking from my own experience in our place we've had cases in our office last week and they're all linked back to education, spread hasn't happened in the office thankfully, but police are checking measures (we had an unannounced visit 2 weeks ago).
Indeed.
Absolute numbers of attendance, 8.9 million in primary and secondary education, 2.4m at university.
A genocide of ghouls.
Thanks. I meant more absolute numbers of infections. Just that the numbers of clusters tells pretty much nothing useful.
The problem with university cases, as opposed to school, is that even if they are proportionate they were entirely avoidable.
Almost all of the cases which we've seen have occurred in halls of residence and it was a ridiculously obvious weak point in the system. No matter what anyone says VC's knew it was inevitable, and (whilst I have little sympathy with them as a class of person) were given little choice but to re-open.
Cynically, I would suggest that the reason support for the sector wasn't forthcoming (which could have prevented case numbers) was because the Conservatives are very happy to use Coronavirus as an excuse to wage ideological warfare on universities. We've seen it happen in Australia, and I doubt we're far behind here.
It’s a fraction of disruption for people visiting these places but not for the industry itself.
People with kids will obviously agree that schools are priority but people without? I wouldn’t be so sure. People are naturally selfish as we know. I think it makes sense if it can be done safely providing we aren’t destroying the future of those same kids in the process. Is that what’s currently happening though? Not for me.
But I completely agree that the lack of communication is a big problem. Being told it’s YOUR fault if Granny dies/Christmas is cancelled is having a negative impact now.
Some of the ONS data might help identifying age ranges, anything under 17 should be attributable to primary & secondary education.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...nd2october2020#covid-19-infection-survey-data
You can make different conclusions from different datasets, but the one that stands out for me is the geographical spread of cases. There are very high concentrations of cases in University areas and in densely populated towns and cities.
If transmission at schools was a major driver, we'd see much more uniform spread across the country - the adantages of living in a low density area would be lost if sending all your kids to spend all day together in a room was the main factor in driving transmission.
The link to Universities seems obvious, we've just sent hundreds of thousands of young adults to live together in cramped conditions with shared facilities, and in a setting where traditionally they have several weeks of big parties.
The link to dense towns and cities suggests household mixing, but this new strategy seems to be linking that to nightlife. That might be fair enough, particularly where students make up a lot of the people going to those venues, but as a blanket strategy I'm not sure it's got much going for it. Transmission in Bolton didn't significantly come down when they had all their pubs closed.
Agreed that would be a better stat. I'd imagine that's a data collection issue: schools have to report a cluster, but don't have to report numbers because it's too much of an administrative burden without helping out the parents much. Maybe they'll start extrapolating based on number of classes and class sizes if they track this for longer, which seems likely given the trajectory.
In any case, I wouldn't say they're pointless. The standard deviation in cluster size would have to be enormous for it to be misleading in at least one relative judgment: there are more covid cases in schools than uni. The fact that there are more schools wouldn't matter so much at that point because we don't care about proportions but absolutes. The magnitude of difference seems relatively unimportant given the broader point: we were told schools wouldn't transmit much, while unis have been held up as the villains, when the truth seems to be they are not that far apart.
Teenagers (secondary school) and young adults the big drivers. Younger kids (primary school) infection rates seem to be flat/declining.
The problem with teens is that it’s impossible to know whether they’re passing the virus round in school or when socialising outside school. I suspect mainly the latter, when they’re not being supervised or wearing masks.
Closing the schools won’t reduce transmission in this age group that occurs outside school (might actually increase it?)
Primary schools have been closed down on the back of a "cluster" of 3 people. There are reports of clusters involving hundreds of kids in University halls. The standard deviation is enormous, and you definitely can't make that relative judgement right now.
A useful site to bookmark - https://www.boycottunsafeschools.co.uk/reported-covid-19-cases/school-cases-after-12-8-20/
Have a look at the ONS data @F-Red linked to. Looks like primary school age children not transmitting much, as predicted. Teenage and uni age infections on the increase. And it was always to be expected that teenagers would behave more like adults when it comes to viral spread.
It’s hard to know whether Uni or secondary schools is a bigger risk but you’d expect that the close supervision secondary school kids get in school would be lower risk than the much more unsupervised interactions in uni (including going on the piss together etc)