#360872
Postby zico » November 28th, 2020, 1:36 pm
Given that "we are where we are" I actually think the government has (finally!) made some good decisions about controlling the pandemic. The tiers are comparatively simple and make sense (obviously London would never be put into Tier 3 whatever the evidence, because the great and good want to go out to nice restaurants) and government has dropped its previous cunning plan of causing delays by endless haggling with various cities about exactly what measures would be done locally and falling out over £5m differences in negotiations.
The "5 Christmas days to kill granny" is obviously not supported by SAGE and will inevitably lead to more deaths, but the media has got everyone worked up about Christmas being a uniquely sacred occasion to hug grandparents and get money and gifts from them (which can't possibly be done any other time of year), so it would be difficult for government to go against the flow, and (more importantly as far as they're concerned, they'd lose popularity).
However, it may not be as bad as SAGE expects, because families will know that if they have a big family get-together across all the generations, any of them subsquently getting Covid will have got it from their get-together. So it wouldn't be a case of their actions affecting people they don't know, but their immediate family being the ones at risk. Maybe people won't be so blase about extra deaths being a small price to pay for socialing when it comes to potentially causing deaths of their loved ones. Also, it's a much more ethically acceptable choice if people say "we're so keen on exercising our freedoms we're willing to risk disease and death in our family" because there is less knock-on effect for strangers who chose not to take those risks.
I'd really like to see the government pushing the idea of an alternative date to Christmas, perhaps early February, which is a pretty miserable time of year anyway, by which time (assuming vaccination competence) could be a time when all our most vulnerable citizens have received the vaccine. This would also help to reduce potential overcrowding on public transport and in shops before and around Christmas. We could call it the "Freedom Festival", "Bounce Back Britain" or somesuch.