I can meet a friend in a pub, a cafe or a local shop, I can meet her in a park but I can’t go into her house.
I can drink until 10pm in a pub but after that I cannot. Can Covid tell the time?
Where will it all end?
None of these measures are ridiculous - they all make complete sense, if you stop thinking about yourself as an individual and start thinking about yourself and the rules in a population of 70 million.
Why is it better for me to meet a friend in a public place than in their own home?
I honestly would love to know the reasons behind these rules.
Because in a public place, where other people can see you (and in a pub, can intervene if you break the rules) you are mor likely to comply with social distancing. Once you get into your friends home and sit around her kitchen table, you are more likely to forget the rules, and (unless your friend lives in a cavernous mansion) they are more difficult to comply with. That’s the reason.
I thought you could visit people's homes as long as it's not more than 6 people in total (I'm in England with no local lockdown in our area). Maybe I've lost the plot in terms of keeping up with the rules.
Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Soil type: sandy, well-drained
I don't know the circumstances of corbyns socialising but what do you do if you're sitting down to dinner with five other people and someone else arrives unexpectedly (to you)? Do you get up and leave?
Oh good! I haven't inadvertently broken the rules.
Although in the last couple of months I've only visited my parents (two of them and one of me), my sister (just the two of us, her hubby was away for work) and a friend who lives alone (again just two).
Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Soil type: sandy, well-drained
The problem with your theory @strelitzia32 is that you can't just say the risk of dying is 0.3 %, because that is only the individual risk of dying. If you come onto my ICU and infect me and maybe 3-4 other staff members, you have to consider their risk of dying. Plus of course the other people you have come into contact with before you required hospitalisation. If you choke to death, it is only you who are affected.
@punkdoc I think this is a slight misinterpretation of the statistics. It is the individual risk of dying, statistically, for everyone. First of all we're talking about risk in the macro sense, not in a clinical care setting which obviously has a higher specific risk due to self selection (unwell people congregate). This is true of any contagion.
The overall risk of contracting the virus in the UK, for a "general" non healthcare worker, is about 0.3%. Healthcare workers have about 12 times the risk, around 3.5% (reference 1), but let's leave that aside for the moment as we're talking macroeconomic concerns rather than individual risk.
If we make a couple of assumptions, we can say that the individual, healthy, under 50, non healthcare worker risk of contracting and then dying from covid is about 0.009% (0.3% of 0.3%). This number obviously will change depending on individual behaviors (do I go to a crowded bar, or do I stay home), but it's a solid number in terms of macro view.
Now let's analyze the cost of avoiding that risk against the risk itself. We know that UK borrowing and spending directly attributable to the virus is between £200billion and £300billion, or about £4,500 for every man, woman and child in the UK. We don't know the impact on tax revenues yet. We also know that many NHS treatments and operations were cancelled, and that screening for cancer and other killers was suspended, but we don't know the impact of that yet. We also don't know the impact of lockdown and social distancing on mental health, which (in terms of dementia for the elderly and suicide for the young) is the most common cause of death in several age groups.
Until all those things are calculated, we can't say with certainty that the measures taken against the virus are measured and correct.
I'm assuming you're a doctor based on your comments - you'll be familiar with the "quality adjusted life year" measure. As distasteful as it may seem, the NHS (and NICE, every health-care provider, every government, every insurer etc) places a value on a year of human life. If the cost to save a life (cost of treatment) exceeds the QALY value, the treatment could be rejected. The current NICE value of 1 year is about £25,000, I think. Although the calculation doesn't quite work this way, we can make a simple comparison. If the covid "response" is the treatment, and we only calculate the direct government expenditure, and 475,000 people have caught covid, its cost is £520,000 per patient, far in excess of a QALY.
That's before we include the cost of poverty, job losses, community impact and so forth, all of which have been proven to lead to negative health outcomes (reference 2). And it also doesn't include the "cost" of missed cancer diagnosis and screening (reference 3), missed heart attacks and so on.
So, on this basis, it appears there is a solid premise to question wether the measures in place are proportionate.
The issue is that humans are very bad at assessing risk (reference 4). People are panicking over the virus, yet would gladly enter a lottery or game of chance where they have a 99.991% chance of winning. Part of this is because of the hysterical media reporting, part is human nature/psychology wanting to take control of the uncontrolled, part is because of poor messaging, and part is because most people do not understand maths and probability correctly.
This is why a simple measure such as "wear a face covering" can result I an outcome a lot worse than intended, and a "cure" worse than the disease.
My point in all this isn't to argue for or against face coverings, or anything else. It's just to highlight that apparently small measures can have unexpected, significant side effects, and so we should all debate and discuss rather than blindly accept.
The problem is people go out earlier and just drink faster to get the same effect, then they all come out onto the streets at the same time and stand around chatting and socialising. I've seen this in my local area when driving home from my daughters.
Posts
The overall risk of contracting the virus in the UK, for a "general" non healthcare worker, is about 0.3%. Healthcare workers have about 12 times the risk, around 3.5% (reference 1), but let's leave that aside for the moment as we're talking macroeconomic concerns rather than individual risk.
If we make a couple of assumptions, we can say that the individual, healthy, under 50, non healthcare worker risk of contracting and then dying from covid is about 0.009% (0.3% of 0.3%). This number obviously will change depending on individual behaviors (do I go to a crowded bar, or do I stay home), but it's a solid number in terms of macro view.
Now let's analyze the cost of avoiding that risk against the risk itself. We know that UK borrowing and spending directly attributable to the virus is between £200billion and £300billion, or about £4,500 for every man, woman and child in the UK. We don't know the impact on tax revenues yet. We also know that many NHS treatments and operations were cancelled, and that screening for cancer and other killers was suspended, but we don't know the impact of that yet. We also don't know the impact of lockdown and social distancing on mental health, which (in terms of dementia for the elderly and suicide for the young) is the most common cause of death in several age groups.
Until all those things are calculated, we can't say with certainty that the measures taken against the virus are measured and correct.
I'm assuming you're a doctor based on your comments - you'll be familiar with the "quality adjusted life year" measure. As distasteful as it may seem, the NHS (and NICE, every health-care provider, every government, every insurer etc) places a value on a year of human life. If the cost to save a life (cost of treatment) exceeds the QALY value, the treatment could be rejected. The current NICE value of 1 year is about £25,000, I think. Although the calculation doesn't quite work this way, we can make a simple comparison. If the covid "response" is the treatment, and we only calculate the direct government expenditure, and 475,000 people have caught covid, its cost is £520,000 per patient, far in excess of a QALY.
That's before we include the cost of poverty, job losses, community impact and so forth, all of which have been proven to lead to negative health outcomes (reference 2). And it also doesn't include the "cost" of missed cancer diagnosis and screening (reference 3), missed heart attacks and so on.
So, on this basis, it appears there is a solid premise to question wether the measures in place are proportionate.
The issue is that humans are very bad at assessing risk (reference 4). People are panicking over the virus, yet would gladly enter a lottery or game of chance where they have a 99.991% chance of winning. Part of this is because of the hysterical media reporting, part is human nature/psychology wanting to take control of the uncontrolled, part is because of poor messaging, and part is because most people do not understand maths and probability correctly.
This is why a simple measure such as "wear a face covering" can result I an outcome a lot worse than intended, and a "cure" worse than the disease.
My point in all this isn't to argue for or against face coverings, or anything else. It's just to highlight that apparently small measures can have unexpected, significant side effects, and so we should all debate and discuss rather than blindly accept.
Ref 1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30164-X/fulltext#tbl2
2: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.bma.org.uk/media/2084/health-at-a-price-2017.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiWr5zx2prsAhXSTcAKHTzuCewQFjAMegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw2tLit2FaliF0ghWDn_cszF
3:https://www.google.com/amp/s/scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2020/04/21/how-coronavirus-is-impacting-cancer-services-in-the-uk/amp/
4: https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/the-psychology-of-risk-perception
There is no indication that *all* of these people will go home together and continue drinking, thus it is an effective control.
People not meeting in houses reduces breaches of social distancing measures. This reduces the soread of CV19.