Our golf course is now open. One person per cart unless family. No more then two people playing together keeping six feet apart. Some other rules about flags and such that I do not understand not being one who plays the game.
Excuse me for being thick, but isn’t golf a form of exercise that also is possible to do whilst social distancing ? As in, why can’t you already do that ?
That’s a very good question, the answer to which is “because the government closed all the courses”.
Those graphs look horrible for the UK, if they are accurate. And yet the support for Boris holds up.
Remember that those graphs are of new confirmed cases, and also that UK testing has increased a lot in the last couple of weeks which may go some way to explain why we’re seeing so many new confirmed cases now.
The likelihood is that our number of new cases was (even more) grossly underreported in earlier weeks, and if we’d had exactly the same testing regime (either way) for the whole period then our chart would have a steeper tail.
To put it another way, it may just be that we’re identifying more of the asymptomatic or mild cases now than we were before, which on a simplified chart will appear to cancel out the reduction in severe cases.
Golf is usually played by a couple or by a foursome. I think the concern is the points of contact one might have with someone else. I would think using a golf cart presents problems. Also, the cup in each of the holes would be problematic, (can't reach inside). There might be some problems in the dressing area. The 19th hole is out for now. Here is Washington State, though, the golf courses are starting to open as long as social distancing and sanitizing standards are met.
Our golf course is now open. One person per cart unless family. No more then two people playing together keeping six feet apart. Some other rules about flags and such that I do not understand not being one who plays the game.
Probably about touching the flags. There are all sorts of things people touch that other people touch when playing golf. Given what one needs to do to remove the likelihood of transfer of virus, I think it stupid to open the courses.
Meanwhile we should all keep an eye on Germany where the slight easing of restrictions has lead to an increase in infection rates, showing that we need to make sure the level of infection in the community is very low before we ease back on the restrictions in place. If we ease back too soon then not only do we add to the death toll, we end up taking longer before we can make a significant step out of lockdown.
Yes indeed. I'd qualify that slightly, though - there are things that we are currently not doing that are probably significantly lower risk than going to the grocery store. Those things can be done without adding to the toll of the virus.
( @Doublethink - in these parts, golf is now allowed, but golf carts are not. Partly because you can't stay 6 feet away from your buddy in a golf cart, partly because that's a whole bunch of shared surface that people will screw up. And there's no going for a beer afterwards.)
I think there's something about flags and not putting, but I don't play golf, so I couldn't say.
Meanwhile we should all keep an eye on Germany where the slight easing of restrictions has lead to an increase in infection rates, showing that we need to make sure the level of infection in the community is very low before we ease back on the restrictions in place. If we ease back too soon then not only do we add to the death toll, we end up taking longer before we can make a significant step out of lockdown.
Yes indeed. I'd qualify that slightly, though - there are things that we are currently not doing that are probably significantly lower risk than going to the grocery store. Those things can be done without adding to the toll of the virus.
Not necessarily. The first is true but the second doesn't follow from that. The risks, at least at the low levels we're talking about, are summative. You go out twice to the supermarket you roughly double your risk of being infected. Let's say for example that two in every 100 000 visits to the supermarket results in an infection, and playing golf is only 1 in every 100 000. That doesn't mean it's ok to play golf. It might do, if the number of people playing golf and the risk associated with it don't push R above 1, but it's not a given. Every easing of lockdown carries a small risk. The trick is to prioritise different activities. If prohibiting golf (and a bunch of other relatively low risk activities) gives you the edge you need to keep R below 1 and, say, keep factories open then that's going to be the choice, even though the factories are the (much) bigger risk.
Excuse me for being thick, but isn’t golf a form of exercise that also is possible to do whilst social distancing ? As in, why can’t you already do that ?
Because people touch all sorts of surfaces playing golf. Courses are allowed to open 15 May here. Balls may not go into a cup. Hit ball onto flag which you may not touch. Club house closed, family members or live in same household may play together only. 12 min intervals between groups. All benches, ball washers removed. Do not pick up others tees. Parking cars in every second stall. All booking and payments are online. No score cards.
There's probably more. Everything is more complicated than one might first think.
The talk of models got me thinking of the water-based computer in Terry Pratchett's Making Money. It was based on a similar analog computer in our world, variously known as the Phillips Hydraulic Computer, MONIAC, and Financephalograph (from Wikipedia). There are still some of them around, as listed in the article.
I liked Pratchett's version, though I love Hex, the...quirky...computer at Unseen University.
Anyway (she said, somewhat whimsically), any chance that the Phillips/MONIAC computer could be useful in modeling the pandemic? The water is used to track and predict the flow of money. How about tracking and predicting the viral spread, as it flows in the world?
Is anyone already using some kind of physical model? If not, maybe the Phillips/MONIAC computer (or some other sort of physical model) could provide a a different perspective?
United Arab Emirates - 18,878 (13,296 / 5,381 / 201)
Israel - 16,506 (4,405 / 11,843 / 258) 2.1%
Poland - 16,326 (9,699 / 5,816 / 811)
Austria - 15,882 (1,201 / 14,061 / 620) 4.2%
Japan - 15,847 (6,921 / 8,293 / 633)
Bangladesh - 15,691 (12,550 / 2,902 / 239)
Ukraine - 15,648 (11,952 / 3,288 / 408)
Romania - 15,588 (7,361 / 7,245 / 982)
Indonesia - 14,265 (10,393 / 2,881 / 991)
Colombia - 11,613 (8,309 / 2,825 / 479)
Philippines - 11,086 (8,361 / 1,999 / 726)
South Korea - 10,936 (1,008 / 9,670 / 258) 2.6%
South Africa - 10,652 (6,089 / 4,357 / 206)
Dominican Republic - 10,634 (7,371 / 2,870 / 393)
Denmark - 10,513 (1,652 / 8,328 / 533) 6.0%
Serbia - 10,176 (6,668 / 3,290 / 218)
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1.
Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries twenty-seven of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked at #2, between "everywhere in the U.S. except New York" (#1) and Spain (#3). New Jersey would be between Brazil and Turkey.
No countries have joined the 10,000 case club since the last compilation.
There's no basis for relaxing the stay at home message, much less actively encourage people to return to work, until there's a working track and trace programme, with excess testing capacity, in place.
There's no basis for relaxing the stay at home message, much less actively encourage people to return to work, until there's a working track and trace programme, with excess testing capacity, in place.
There is if you've already had it and have concluded it's mostly poor, brown and old people who will die so it's not important any more.
Sorry, the best way to control the virus, so why is there this confusion? I don't know if it goes back to the scientists, or if the cabinet is split into factions, or Boris is not thinking clearly. Or all three?
I think the essential problem is the same one as in the US: an attempt to manage the crisis as a PR/image crisis rather than a health crisis. The government's usual strategies are ill-fitted to integrating scientific facts and experts.
I think the essential problem is the same one as in the US: an attempt to manage the crisis as a PR/image crisis rather than a health crisis. The government's usual strategies are ill-fitted to integrating scientific facts and experts.
The govt have wavered between different approaches, herd immunity, lockdown, and contact tracing.
The three approaches have valid reasons to be used at different stages of a pandemic. So, some movement between approaches is appropriate as the pandemic moves between stages.
At the early stages where you have a very small number of people who show symptoms, contact tracing and isolation should slow the spread of the virus without significantly impacting the rest of the community. This gives time for the rest of the community to prepare for the virus to move into a community transmission stage - by, for example, making sure there's sufficient PPE in stock, start ramping up testing capacity, start preparing hospitals by cancelling elective surgery.
With a disease like this coronavirus where there's an extended asymptomatic period contact tracing will eventually miss someone, and then the disease will start to spread in the community. At that point you need to switch to a lockdown, ideally you want to do that just prior to the disease starting to spread in the community. You still want to continue contact tracing and testing because no lockdown is perfect, and especially amongst those who have no choice but to work (health care, food retail, care workers, public transport etc) because you want to get on top of each outbreak within those groups of workers asap.
Then, when the lockdown has suppressed the virus transmission sufficiently you can start to relax that and return to relying on contact tracing as your primary approach - while being prepared for a return to lockdown if needed.
When there's a vaccine available and widely used you can rely on herd immunity as your primary approach, while maintaining contact tracing and tracking.
I've yet to see any evidence that the UK government approach has approximated to that scheme, except at the very beginning when we were quarantining people coming back from Wuhan and contact tracing the first few people who came down with symptoms. There's little evidence of the government putting plans in place to deal with community transmission (giving advice to business about what lockdown would look like, planning how they'd support people furloughed including self employed, or procuring substantial supplies of PPE for health and care workers or ventilators and other equipment) during this initial stage. There was an effective cessation of contact tracing once we locked down, and testing of key workers was never sufficient. And, there's no evidence of working out a working contact tracing system in place (there's a trial of a piece of tech that could be part of such a system on the Isle of White), and without that we can't start letting people out more without a significant boost to infection rates.
And, there's no vaccine, let alone one which has been administered to a significant proportion of the population, and so herd immunity shouldn't have been part of the lexicon of government policies at all.
So there's nobody in the cabinet with a logical mind, who can see the necessity of contact tracing? I suppose they would get swamped by Boris's need for approval.
Another point is that instead of one big outbreak, you have a number of local outbreaks. The old public health inspectors could have used contact tracing to isolate them, but I surmise that they have been reduced and cut. Happy days.
So there's nobody in the cabinet with a logical mind, who can see the necessity of contact tracing? I suppose they would get swamped by Boris's need for approval.
Apparently not. Lots of people seeing the cart (relaxing restrictions) but not the horse (making sure it's as safe as possible to relax restrictions).
To relax those restrictions the horse needs to go first - ensure that businesses have put in measures to ensure the possibility of transmission of the virus between staff and/or customers are in place, and that includes not just the work place but getting to work (ie: public transport); ensure that there's a working contact tracing system in place (finish the Isle of Wight trials of the app, and bring in the other conventional approaches to contact tracing that will be supported by that, and over-capacity for testing); and get a clear, prepared message that lets people know what they can do, and when, that instills at least some degree of confidence that this is sound advice.
I think the essential problem is the same one as in the US: an attempt to manage the crisis as a PR/image crisis rather than a health crisis. The government's usual strategies are ill-fitted to integrating scientific facts and experts.
As others have pointed out this can be seen quite clearly in the nonsense that is the 5-step scale; a scale is generally created to simplify communications, but then the current situation ends up falling between two steps - on a scale generated to describe the present. Clearly it was felt that '4' might panic the public, while '3' might encourage complacency, so '3.5' becomes the only acceptable choice.
But then, if they are correct, why would you choose to loosen restrictions when you were at 3.5 unless it was clear that all indicators were decreasing at quite a rate (they aren't) surely this could just lead to things getting worse -- and the UK would be heading up the scale.
So there's nobody in the cabinet with a logical mind, who can see the necessity of contact tracing? I suppose they would get swamped by Boris's need for approval.
No, I'm sure there are people with logical minds in the Cabinet. It's the whole system that's skewed. @chrisstiles' example is the embodiment of this. It's the logical application of a mindset that manages crises in a PR way.
This works most of the time, and indeed is more successful most of the time, because it's persuasive and many of the underlying realities (such as a "terrorist threat") are highly subjective.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that type of logic. The fact remains, though, that this type of person trained to present information is going to be supremely ill-equipped to deal with actual problems that can be addressed in terms of hard science.
(I'm reminded of an industrial director of a multinational I often work for who repeatedly bemoaned factory managers who were more absorbed in making pretty Powerpoint presentations than the realities of spreadsheets recording production line data or indeed actually visiting the workshop. In one anecdote he recalled visiting a facility in which warning lights showed several machines out of action, whereas the office staff assured him all was well according to their computer displays. The factory floor was visible from their office windows. See also Death by Powerpoint).
If you want to introduce some relaxation and don't have sufficient testing and tracing in place then you have to ignore the significance of the new case numbers. And keep your fingers crossed. That would appear to be the English policy.
I'm self isolating old style, thank you very much.
Which sounds fine on the surface. But it involves having choices and money. It’s easy to use common sense if you don’t need to work, can work from home, never need to use public transport. ie you have plenty of money, a car and a place to park it. Or you are fit and can walk/cycle long distances.
I'm not sure anything has actually relaxed that much in practice. People are already allowed to go to work if they can't work from home, and I strongly suspect that whether or not they actually do so depends more on the balance of power between employer and employee, rather than on anything the Government says. And if the employer provides an unsafe working environment, then the employee has limited recourse, thanks to 40 years of anti-union laws.
Meeting one individual person outside the home has always been implicitly allowed in the fact that gatherings of more than two are forbidden.
Common sense suggests you ignore the new advice from the English government and keep on with the precautions you've got used to. Stay home except for essentials, only go to work if you can't work at home and your work is essential, don't congregate in the parks or risk infecting others by chasing a wee ball around the meadow.
Well, the government has now issued instructions with diagrams on how we can all make ourselves face masks out of old tee shirts, to keep us all safe. <eye roll>
I'm not sure anything has actually relaxed that much in practice. People are already allowed to go to work if they can't work from home, and I strongly suspect that whether or not they actually do so depends more on the balance of power between employer and employee, rather than on anything the Government says.
I'd tend to agree that the actual guidance hasn't changed much - I suspect that they are assuming they can 'nudge' things along with tone, and it isn't clear to what extent that will make a difference.
OTOH the announcements of changes to the financing of furloughing is likely to have some knock on impact.
Which sounds fine on the surface. But it involves having choices and money. It’s easy to use common sense if you don’t need to work, can work from home, never need to use public transport. ie you have plenty of money, a car and a place to park it. Or you are fit and can walk/cycle long distances.
Social media is full of people saying that poor and brown people can be sacrificed, by sending them to work, plus the old, while the affluent can get on with Zoom sessions, and getting a sun-tan. Possibly a bit harsh.
Common sense suggests you ignore the new advice from the English government and keep on with the precautions you've got used to. Stay home except for essentials, only go to work if you can't work at home and your work is essential, don't congregate in the parks or risk infecting others by chasing a wee ball around the meadow.
I'm rather hoping Boris will demonstrate, Blue Peter style, when he next addresses the nation.
Hmmm, "prepared earlier" doesn't really seem to be his style.
Pretty much sums up the way I see things. I suppose if you want to be Churchillian, scientific advice saying "tiptoe very cautiously out if you feel you must, but be prepared to tiptoe rapidly back in" sounds a bit craven.
Social media is full of people saying that poor and brown people can be sacrificed, by sending them to work, plus the old, while the affluent can get on with Zoom sessions, and getting a sun-tan. Possibly a bit harsh.
I think this is an uncomfortable truth. Middle management, middle-class jobs can more often be done remotely, by people living in independent houses and not flats and less likely to use public transport.
Eschewing a Zoom meeting for a face-to-face one merely to demonstrate social solidarity doesn't seem like a terribly good idea either.
But if the tories sacrifice the poor, brown people who do a lot of the Real Work, who will look after the said tories when they have to go to hospital/hospice/care home?
Who will wipe their bottoms? Who will bring them a cuppa tea?
Boris's message to people going back to work, cross your fingers.
But who is going back to work.
Can someone explain this to me like I'm five?
Prior to Sunday, at the beginning of lockdown, we were told to work from home if we could, but could still travel to work if it was necessary - the travel that is, not necessarily the job. Places which actually closed had staff furloughed.
So what actually changed on Sunday - people were encouraged to go back to work, but surely everyone's furloughed because their place of work is closed, working from home or already travelling to work.
But if the tories sacrifice the poor, brown people who do a lot of the Real Work, who will look after the said tories when they have to go to hospital/hospice/care home?
Who will wipe their bottoms? Who will bring them a cuppa tea?
People where the company couldn't really do things properly. But think the risk/liabilities are 'low enough' if they can promise to blame Boris, then blame the workers.
But if the tories sacrifice the poor, brown people who do a lot of the Real Work, who will look after the said tories when they have to go to hospital/hospice/care home?
Who will wipe their bottoms? Who will bring them a cuppa tea?
I suspect some of the workers in that tube picture are construction workers, I saw quite a few hard hats, work clothes and tool kits, and spotted someone walking home last night, as if from the tube, carrying work tools. Social distancing is possible on site, but not travelling there by public transport.
Comments
I hope the ‘red’ governments are learning from the ‘green’ ones.
That’s a very good question, the answer to which is “because the government closed all the courses”.
Remember that those graphs are of new confirmed cases, and also that UK testing has increased a lot in the last couple of weeks which may go some way to explain why we’re seeing so many new confirmed cases now.
The likelihood is that our number of new cases was (even more) grossly underreported in earlier weeks, and if we’d had exactly the same testing regime (either way) for the whole period then our chart would have a steeper tail.
To put it another way, it may just be that we’re identifying more of the asymptomatic or mild cases now than we were before, which on a simplified chart will appear to cancel out the reduction in severe cases.
Yes indeed. I'd qualify that slightly, though - there are things that we are currently not doing that are probably significantly lower risk than going to the grocery store. Those things can be done without adding to the toll of the virus.
( @Doublethink - in these parts, golf is now allowed, but golf carts are not. Partly because you can't stay 6 feet away from your buddy in a golf cart, partly because that's a whole bunch of shared surface that people will screw up. And there's no going for a beer afterwards.)
I think there's something about flags and not putting, but I don't play golf, so I couldn't say.
Not necessarily. The first is true but the second doesn't follow from that. The risks, at least at the low levels we're talking about, are summative. You go out twice to the supermarket you roughly double your risk of being infected. Let's say for example that two in every 100 000 visits to the supermarket results in an infection, and playing golf is only 1 in every 100 000. That doesn't mean it's ok to play golf. It might do, if the number of people playing golf and the risk associated with it don't push R above 1, but it's not a given. Every easing of lockdown carries a small risk. The trick is to prioritise different activities. If prohibiting golf (and a bunch of other relatively low risk activities) gives you the edge you need to keep R below 1 and, say, keep factories open then that's going to be the choice, even though the factories are the (much) bigger risk.
Because people touch all sorts of surfaces playing golf. Courses are allowed to open 15 May here. Balls may not go into a cup. Hit ball onto flag which you may not touch. Club house closed, family members or live in same household may play together only. 12 min intervals between groups. All benches, ball washers removed. Do not pick up others tees. Parking cars in every second stall. All booking and payments are online. No score cards.
There's probably more. Everything is more complicated than one might first think.
Thanks for all the input!
The talk of models got me thinking of the water-based computer in Terry Pratchett's Making Money. It was based on a similar analog computer in our world, variously known as the Phillips Hydraulic Computer, MONIAC, and Financephalograph (from Wikipedia). There are still some of them around, as listed in the article.
I liked Pratchett's version, though I love Hex, the...quirky...computer at Unseen University.
Anyway (she said, somewhat whimsically), any chance that the Phillips/MONIAC computer could be useful in modeling the pandemic? The water is used to track and predict the flow of money. How about tracking and predicting the viral spread, as it flows in the world?
Is anyone already using some kind of physical model? If not, maybe the Phillips/MONIAC computer (or some other sort of physical model) could provide a a different perspective?
Just a thought and speculation, FWIW.
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1.
Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries twenty-seven of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked at #2, between "everywhere in the U.S. except New York" (#1) and Spain (#3). New Jersey would be between Brazil and Turkey.
No countries have joined the 10,000 case club since the last compilation.
There is if you've already had it and have concluded it's mostly poor, brown and old people who will die so it's not important any more.
This.
At the early stages where you have a very small number of people who show symptoms, contact tracing and isolation should slow the spread of the virus without significantly impacting the rest of the community. This gives time for the rest of the community to prepare for the virus to move into a community transmission stage - by, for example, making sure there's sufficient PPE in stock, start ramping up testing capacity, start preparing hospitals by cancelling elective surgery.
With a disease like this coronavirus where there's an extended asymptomatic period contact tracing will eventually miss someone, and then the disease will start to spread in the community. At that point you need to switch to a lockdown, ideally you want to do that just prior to the disease starting to spread in the community. You still want to continue contact tracing and testing because no lockdown is perfect, and especially amongst those who have no choice but to work (health care, food retail, care workers, public transport etc) because you want to get on top of each outbreak within those groups of workers asap.
Then, when the lockdown has suppressed the virus transmission sufficiently you can start to relax that and return to relying on contact tracing as your primary approach - while being prepared for a return to lockdown if needed.
When there's a vaccine available and widely used you can rely on herd immunity as your primary approach, while maintaining contact tracing and tracking.
I've yet to see any evidence that the UK government approach has approximated to that scheme, except at the very beginning when we were quarantining people coming back from Wuhan and contact tracing the first few people who came down with symptoms. There's little evidence of the government putting plans in place to deal with community transmission (giving advice to business about what lockdown would look like, planning how they'd support people furloughed including self employed, or procuring substantial supplies of PPE for health and care workers or ventilators and other equipment) during this initial stage. There was an effective cessation of contact tracing once we locked down, and testing of key workers was never sufficient. And, there's no evidence of working out a working contact tracing system in place (there's a trial of a piece of tech that could be part of such a system on the Isle of White), and without that we can't start letting people out more without a significant boost to infection rates.
And, there's no vaccine, let alone one which has been administered to a significant proportion of the population, and so herd immunity shouldn't have been part of the lexicon of government policies at all.
To relax those restrictions the horse needs to go first - ensure that businesses have put in measures to ensure the possibility of transmission of the virus between staff and/or customers are in place, and that includes not just the work place but getting to work (ie: public transport); ensure that there's a working contact tracing system in place (finish the Isle of Wight trials of the app, and bring in the other conventional approaches to contact tracing that will be supported by that, and over-capacity for testing); and get a clear, prepared message that lets people know what they can do, and when, that instills at least some degree of confidence that this is sound advice.
As others have pointed out this can be seen quite clearly in the nonsense that is the 5-step scale; a scale is generally created to simplify communications, but then the current situation ends up falling between two steps - on a scale generated to describe the present. Clearly it was felt that '4' might panic the public, while '3' might encourage complacency, so '3.5' becomes the only acceptable choice.
But then, if they are correct, why would you choose to loosen restrictions when you were at 3.5 unless it was clear that all indicators were decreasing at quite a rate (they aren't) surely this could just lead to things getting worse -- and the UK would be heading up the scale.
No, I'm sure there are people with logical minds in the Cabinet. It's the whole system that's skewed. @chrisstiles' example is the embodiment of this. It's the logical application of a mindset that manages crises in a PR way.
This works most of the time, and indeed is more successful most of the time, because it's persuasive and many of the underlying realities (such as a "terrorist threat") are highly subjective.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that type of logic. The fact remains, though, that this type of person trained to present information is going to be supremely ill-equipped to deal with actual problems that can be addressed in terms of hard science.
(I'm reminded of an industrial director of a multinational I often work for who repeatedly bemoaned factory managers who were more absorbed in making pretty Powerpoint presentations than the realities of spreadsheets recording production line data or indeed actually visiting the workshop. In one anecdote he recalled visiting a facility in which warning lights showed several machines out of action, whereas the office staff assured him all was well according to their computer displays. The factory floor was visible from their office windows. See also Death by Powerpoint).
I'd say very. He's like Trump. Don't make the mistake of thinking he's stupid.
I'm self isolating old style, thank you very much.
Which sounds fine on the surface. But it involves having choices and money. It’s easy to use common sense if you don’t need to work, can work from home, never need to use public transport. ie you have plenty of money, a car and a place to park it. Or you are fit and can walk/cycle long distances.
Meeting one individual person outside the home has always been implicitly allowed in the fact that gatherings of more than two are forbidden.
I'd tend to agree that the actual guidance hasn't changed much - I suspect that they are assuming they can 'nudge' things along with tone, and it isn't clear to what extent that will make a difference.
OTOH the announcements of changes to the financing of furloughing is likely to have some knock on impact.
Social media is full of people saying that poor and brown people can be sacrificed, by sending them to work, plus the old, while the affluent can get on with Zoom sessions, and getting a sun-tan. Possibly a bit harsh.
Pretty much sums up the way I see things. I suppose if you want to be Churchillian, scientific advice saying "tiptoe very cautiously out if you feel you must, but be prepared to tiptoe rapidly back in" sounds a bit craven.
Eschewing a Zoom meeting for a face-to-face one merely to demonstrate social solidarity doesn't seem like a terribly good idea either.
Who will wipe their bottoms? Who will bring them a cuppa tea?
But who is going back to work.
Can someone explain this to me like I'm five?
Prior to Sunday, at the beginning of lockdown, we were told to work from home if we could, but could still travel to work if it was necessary - the travel that is, not necessarily the job. Places which actually closed had staff furloughed.
So what actually changed on Sunday - people were encouraged to go back to work, but surely everyone's furloughed because their place of work is closed, working from home or already travelling to work.
So who is just going back now?
There are always more poor and brown people.
The people who work in the places that are about to reopen, i suppose.
People where the company couldn't really do things properly. But think the risk/liabilities are 'low enough' if they can promise to blame Boris, then blame the workers.