(30 Aug 2020, 12:03 am)Storx wrote Makes sense then wasn't aware of the £50m fund.


Ah it wasn't the one way systems etc I was talking about it was more the basics such as actually counting how many people are in the store, having an organised queueline for the tills rather than it being all over the place, staff actually bothered to wear face masks (no way does 90% of the staff in certain stores have hidden illnesses) and stuff like that. Things that rise exponentially are dangerous; 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16394. That's what can happen in 2 weeks if your not careful with what your doing - it's certainly still needed and we're already at the 1024 stage as it is. 4 days at an R rate of 2 and you've got 16k cases.

The issue is the stores just aren't designed for organised queue lines, they end up blocking aisles. If they have a limit of 50 people in the store, but they all want to leave at exactly the same time, you're still going to have an issue. Which goes back to what I said further up about one way systems, if the stores are designed from the ground up for 'social distancing', then it's all great. But in stores like ALDI and LIDL where space is limited, literally half the store is inaccessible once more than 4 people are waiting!

My point about the numbers of cases wasn't necessarily about the number itself, but the fact you can't really 'trust' the statistics. Back then the exponential rise was, in my opinion anyway, just as much caused by the lack of awareness as the R rate itself. With the amount of tests they're carrying out now, spikes can be found early, whereas at the start it wasn't until you were literally at your death bed that you could get a test and find out if you have it. Now, you can literally get a test done in a matter of minutes. A couple weeks back, my mother and younger brother both had a temperature so went online and booked a test, within 20 minutes she was at the test site having the test, and by the next evening she had the results back (which both came back negative).

Plus, I'm still waiting for all those second peaks we're supposed to have had by now, there was those times everyone went to the beach, the 'protests', the opening of the borders, the end of the shielding program, the reopening of pubs.

Now, I'm not downplaying the fact it can rise exponentially, it's happened before, but the fact the deaths aren't increasing but the cases are suggests either COVID is becoming less deadly, or it was never /that/ deadly in the first place and a lot of people who had it weren't ill enough to even realise they had it. I suppose only time, and mass antibody testing will tell