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    Easing the lockdown

    So, how's going to go?

    Looking at what's happened in the rest of the World people are going to go a bit mad. It's already happening to be fair and last weekend the seafront down here was quite busy in places, even though everything is closed including the toilets. I don't blame people for coming down, they've got to have something to do and if you've got young children, the idea of taking them to go and play on the beach must seem really attractive. My mental health has improved considerably over the last 48 hours as well. Now I realise we're looking forward a lot of the anxiety as gone. My mood has lifted and I'm beginning to plan things again.

    As for the Boris road map to unlocking us, it's a plan, whether or not it's a good one or not remains to be seem and there are a lot of questions over it which I thought Kier Starmer did a very good job of addressing yesterday in the House of Commons.

    #2
    In a kind of (ok, very) selfish kind of way I'm glad that the UK are a couple of weeks behind many other European countries, in that we can see how things go over there before doing stuff ourselves. From a personal point of view the current changes will make absolutely no difference to me as the only times I ever go out apart from work (where we're staying home for the foreseeable future) are watching live sport and pubs, and those are going to be about the last two things to come back. And even when they do, I'll probably have to avoid the pubs for the first week or so until the novelty wears off for the nobheads.

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      #3
      It makes no odds in this country.

      Tell people they can go and sit in a park for thirty minutes with their partners and you can guarantee there'll be 20,000 blokes in Union Jack shorts on the beach within hours.

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        #4
        From my local newspaper, the local council are considering closing the seafront in the fight against Covid 19.

        SOUTHEND’S seafront and parks may have to close to prevent a second coronavirus spike amid fears of families overwhelming the town.

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          #5
          It has just depressed me. People are idiots, every beauty spot will be rammed pack with no social distancing and we'll have a second wave by summer nevermind winter.

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            #6
            Yeah, no real difference for me. I'll still be working from home for the forseeable future, and I don't fancy hopping on public transport to visit the family (some of whom are at risk anyway so not wise for them to be exposed).

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              #7
              I'm probably more anxious about it now than I was last week. The way in which the government has gone about things in the last week, with the kite flying, u-turns and other ambiguous communications and the absolute mess that they have made of the practicalities of the "easing" is going to be writ large over the next few months. It's the worst of both worlds, there will be another spike, or multiple spikes and when they come the government thinks it can turn restrictions up and down like a thermostat, and you only have to look at the way they handled the simple question yesterday of whether someone is allowed to meet their parents outdoors to see how that is going to go. Forward planning for any sort of leisure activity is going to be pointless for the rest of the year.

              Like pebblefish it's not going to make much difference to me in the short term, we are all working from home and when the office does re-open some of us will be kept at home longer than others, and my team will be one of the last back in.

              Locally, the government has created the potential clusterfuck in the Lake District, by telling people they can drive as far as they want to exercise as much as they want.

              It's going to be a long summer, and not in a good way.

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                #8
                Did you see the bloke from the Lake District tourist board on Breakfast this morning Walt? Here was a bloke who spends his entire life trying to get people to come to the Lake District having to say "No, no, please don't come!"

                I like the idea that the two people from different households now allowed to meet up at a two metre distance will all be all those couples who have been forced apart for the last two months. If a single pair of those stay appropriately distanced I will be somewhat disbelieving.

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                  #9
                  The reaction of the various tourism boards in Lakes, Dales, etc has been one of horrified shock...

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                    #10
                    The first steps to ease the lockdown restrictions won't really have much of an effect upon my household. The only real benefit is that my son will now be able to meet up with friends in a public place without, technically, breaking the restrictions, though everyone in my immediate family (apart from me) have had the occasional, impeccably-socially distanced meet-up with friends in the last few weeks, along with a lot of ad hoc conversations on the street with neighbours. So one of my son's university friends and her boyfriend (they've been living together during the lockdown) are driving over tomorrow.

                    I'll have to see if any of my mates, almost all of which live north of the river, fancy schlepping over to the North Downs for a couple of hours!

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                      #11
                      There's some loosening here but today the local supermarket chain Consum have announced that from next week masks will be obligatory for customers.

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                        #12
                        Amazed to read in the Grauniad that all restrictions on travel distances have been abolished - here, the 2km radius was extended to 5km, and may stretch as far as 20km next month!

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by pebblethefish View Post
                          I like the idea that the two people from different households now allowed to meet up at a two metre distance will all be all those couples who have been forced apart for the last two months. If a single pair of those stay appropriately distanced I will be somewhat disbelieving.
                          I offer my sister and her other half. They haven't seen each other in person since pre-lockdown, like many other couples in long distance relationships. They knew it was coming, and chose not to spend the time together because of other life considerations. But if you restrict it to couples who don't live under the same roof but are within walking/short drive distance of each other, then maybe you might be right.

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                            #14
                            Originally posted by Diable Rouge View Post
                            Amazed to read in the Grauniad that all restrictions on travel distances have been abolished - here, the 2km radius was extended to 5km, and may stretch as far as 20km next month!
                            They weren't restrictions on travel distances in the first place, so I'm not sure how those would be eased. It was never stronger than 'advice'. I have colleagues who are in the lab every day who have been driving in from 50+ miles away to be there. And that was within the rules and the advice - the job couldn't be done from home so coming in was within the framework set out.

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                              #15
                              I had a couple of emails last week from local tourist boards along the lines of "normally we'd want you to visit Norfolk (or wherever) but please don't for the time being".

                              Pubs are going to be a total nightmare for the government to reopen. Closing them was relatively easy, pubgoing fell during that week when Johnson said "don't go to the pub but we're not closing them" and brewers saw which way the wind was blowing anyway and switched to brewing for home consumption about a week earlier. They can't just be reopened on a "starting Wednesday" basis, there's no stock in any of them and it's been estimated that it would take 2-3 weeks to brew and distribute sufficient product for an adequate number of venues to reopen. They're also not really something that it would be easy to open and shut if (when) there's a spike in cases.

                              Clearly events in other countries can be monitored in the meantime (New Zealand with their zero new cases today are reopening bars on Thursday week) and other areas of hospitality will be opened first, but as time moves on there will be all sorts of issues and interest groups arising - the ongoing cost to the government of having staff on furlough, loss of tax revenues, landlords not getting paid rent because the venue isn't trading, banking pressures, Boris Johnson being seen as the prime minister who stopped Britons going to the pub, Sky Sports, anti alcohol groups using the situation as a fig leaf to push their campaign. Whenever they do reopen there will presumably be some form of social distancing in place. The companies with their spacious venues (especially Wetherspoons, annoyingly) will do better than the micropubs with a few tables - and masses of the latter closing wouldn't look great for the Tories as the establishment of such is promoting classic Tory enterprise, business creation, employing staff etc. There will also likely be instances where the press will fall over themselves to uncover examples where social distancing is being ignored. Plus it'll largely be up to the pubs to police social distancing and any other restrictions placed on them, my sense is that they will be so desperate for the business they will largely say bollocks to all this providing staff are kept safe and there's no threat of licence breaches. So the government are going to be damned when they do open pubs and damned if they don't, and although they've made a total horlicks of the crisis so far I don't envy them whenever they have to make these decisions.

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by pebblethefish View Post
                                Did you see the bloke from the Lake District tourist board on Breakfast this morning Walt? Here was a bloke who spends his entire life trying to get people to come to the Lake District having to say "No, no, please don't come!"
                                Didn't see that particular example but have seen the tweets and Facebook posts along the same lines, including those which warn that Cumbria is - per capita - one of the areas hit hardest by the virus. On that point I don't think Cumbria is particularly rife with it - there are three main clusters around Carlisle, Kendal and Barrow and these may be a combination of an early case in each of Carlisle and Barrow, and the fact that these are locations of hospitals - but it is always going to be a potent mix if we start getting thousands of people travelling in an out of the area each weekend.

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                                  #17
                                  Originally posted by Diable Rouge View Post
                                  Amazed to read in the Grauniad that all restrictions on travel distances have been abolished - here, the 2km radius was extended to 5km, and may stretch as far as 20km next month!
                                  In Romania they decided that from this Friday we could travel up to 30kms, but basically not leave your home town or its environs. As a measure for jump starting the economy though, they also said you could go and stay at a hotel (with certain rules in place regarding social distancing and disinfecting stuff). Some people pointed out that if you can't leave your home town, the idea of staying at a hotel was not really all that. (Especially because restaurants remain closed, so you'd basically have to picnic in your room). So the interior minister said that, no you could travel, and go to the mountains and so on. Then the prime minister said that this had just been his opinion and this had not yet been decided yet.

                                  TL;DR other governments are as clueless and chaotic as the UK's

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                                    #18
                                    On the pub reopening thing, I see no one picked up on Johnson that pubs and restaurants will reopen “by July 4th at the latest” when he meant to say “earliest”.

                                    Somewhere Diane Abbott scowls and uncorks another bottle of wine.

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                                      #19
                                      Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
                                      On the pub reopening thing, I see no one picked up on Johnson that pubs and restaurants will reopen “by July 4th at the latest” when he meant to say “earliest”.

                                      Somewhere Diane Abbott scowls and uncorks another bottle of wine.
                                      He also sparked alarm by suggesting that the virus is present in the water supply, when he meant sewage system. Insert own analogy here.

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                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by Janik View Post
                                        They weren't restrictions on travel distances in the first place, so I'm not sure how those would be eased. It was never stronger than 'advice'. I have colleagues who are in the lab every day who have been driving in from 50+ miles away to be there. And that was within the rules and the advice - the job couldn't be done from home so coming in was within the framework set out.
                                        No issue with long trips for work but for leisure...? Nope...

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                                          #21
                                          My mother is taking regular walks with one of her sisters. Now I can see why, the sister has had mental health issues for 30 years and needs support, but in my mother's own words she (my mother) is "on the 2nd tier of vulnerability (!) because of my fibromyalgia and age. Hysterical."

                                          As my mother gets older, she is basically turning into her mother when it comes to her health, gran had developed diabetes in her latter years and did precisely fuck all about her diet or anything else, because she was fine, it was all nonsense, thank you very much.

                                          My mother is still doing volunteer work at the hedgehog sanctuary down the road from her. All very worthy BUT WHY THE FUCK IS AN ELDERLY WOMAN WITH LIFELONG HEALTH ISSUES FUCKING LOOKING AFTER FUCKING HEDGEHOGS? Because no Government is going to tell her otherwise.

                                          That's why we are fucked.

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                                            #22
                                            There's an interesting article in The Atlantic, here: We're all getting quarantine fatigue and easing the lockdown is going to happen. We can handle "abstinence only" for only a short period of time.

                                            Therefore, what needs to happen is for governments (or whatever the competent authority is) to give clear, sensible guidelines for how to stay relatively safe once quarantine ends. What you don't want is a free-for-all where people don't know what is sensible and what's not. The UK government seems to be doing to exact opposite: giving vague and unhelpful advice which means that people will be vilified for safely chatting on the doorstep to a neighbour but will end up increasing infections by going to unsafe and non-essential workplaces.
                                            Last edited by San Bernardhinault; 12-05-2020, 15:34.

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                                              #23
                                              SB - link doesn't work

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                                                #24
                                                Fixed, hopefully

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                                                  #25
                                                  A much more intelligent discussion than the "I need a haircut" crowd

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