Face Coverings on Buses

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07 Sep 2021, 10:39 pm #11

(07 Sep 2021, 9:53 pm)Adrian Most people when I've been out aren't bothering now. I only do if people start to board the bus or I cannot keep away from others, e.g. by sitting upstairs, but the majority of buses I use haven't been that busy. I have to admit, it doesn't annoy me as it once did, and certainly vaccination has give me more peace of mind. Along with regular lateral flow testing through work.

Aside from buses, I don't bother at all in supermarkets and shops now, mainly because I can still keep a good distance away from everyone else. I was for the first few weeks of it being optional, but I find more and more people aren't now. The supermarket messaging especially has been very much 'for the protection of our staff', but when the vast majority aren't reciprocating the arrangement, you can see why the customers aren't bothering.

The UK case data over the next week or two will be interesting. Although it feels its rarely mentioned now, we've still gone up over 10k on the 7 day case average during August, and that is with one of the major factors being absent - education.

We're probably too far down the road of pissing into the wind to change now though.

I think it's due to the fact that the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths is nowhere near what it once was. If an extra 10k deaths results in an extra 10 deaths a day (insert the obligatory every death is sad statement here), is it really worth bashing on about it?

At the end of the day, lockdowns were only there to 'protect the NHS'. And, assuming things scale linearly, even if we double the number of cases, we would only be at half the number of hospitalisations that there were in December/January (obviously there would be other implications with double the number of cases, like increased risk of spreading etc.)

It's going to be interesting to see the data coming in from Scotland with regards to the link between cases, hospitalisations, and deaths following the return to school.

Obviously with the re-introduction of mass testing there is going to be an uptick in positive results, but seeing how that translates into higher hospitalisations will be interesting considering it looks like (to my untrained eye) the cases started to increase around a week before the schools went back, with both cases and hospitalisations increasing on the same date (13th August). In the past there has usually been a delay between the two. It's been a good few weeks and deaths have yet to really increase by any significant margin, but obviously analysing this kind of data isn't my speciality (and I've had a glass or few of Lidl's finest)

streetdeckfan