Science have not done themselfs a favour with their behaviour either.
I think the general public just doesn’t appreciate that science is naturally full of dissenting views.
Another thing is that you can’t p1ss off whoever authorises your research grants. This discussion rapidly becomes totally political 
So if a govt forms a committee of scientists, they need somebody with a proper science education (which excludes most politicians) to interpret the advice and make decisions.
notably restaurants which are now going to be closed,
Maybe this is not a problem in Germany but here in the UK one cannot expect the owner of a cafe/bar/restaurant/etc to police behaviour. And once you open, with a capacity for say 50, if you get 200, you can’t do anything… the police don’t want to get involved either. There is practically zero enforcement of anything like this.
It doesn’t surprise me most transfer happens in the home. You have kids, they will catch it, and they live with their parents… No sh*t Sherlock, as the saying goes
MedEwok wrote:
Instead, working from home should be mandatory in all office jobs. Private homes must be monitored more closely, but this is very problematic from a legal and practical perspective. I am afraid there is no easy solution.Meanwhile, the mask discussion should really be buried. There is no point in it. Masks do zero harm, and if they help only a little then we should be grateful for that and use them wherever people meet.
This. I don’t understand how people could be anti-mask, it is simple to comply with, and even if it only has a small chance of helping, that is better than none and it doesnt hurt. Any small effort with potential for help makes sense to do.
Also, office jobs. Up until recently my wife was being forced to go into the office multiple times a week (or risk being out of a job) for a job that can 100% be done from home with no consequence to productivity. She is not the only case I know like this. An open office full of people, talking, having lunch together, etc for 8 hours a day multiple days a week seems like a large contributor to infections. Is this not the case? Why is there so much focus on restaurants, rather than office workers doing home office. At least here in Germany restaurants will be mandated to be closed, but why not mandate of “If your job does not absolutely require physical presence, do it from home” ?
@Peter, I’m surprised that there is a UK issue with restaurant occupancy compliance, public behavior and so on. My observation in the US is that the vast majority of restaurants and other businesses are successfully self-policed and that if they weren’t most people wouldn’t go there. Maybe that just reflects my age (it’s been a long time since my 20s) and the places I go… we eat out 1-2 times a week but aren’t doing much ‘clubbing’ at this stage
Re science and the management of dissenting views, I was really lucky when I was in my 20s and 30s to work with a guy who was the first person with an engineer job title on a major fusion energy research reactor operation. He taught me a lot about this through his behavior, but now 45 years after he started that job he’s long retired, his strong and effective leadership did have some effect but the scientists on that still ongoing project are basically back to research mode. Some technologies are not easy, all of them take finite time to resolve and have competing solutions during that chaotic period.
Silvaire wrote:
@Peter, I’m surprised that there is a UK issue with restaurant occupancy compliance, public behavior and so on. My observation in the US is that the vast majority of restaurants and other businesses are successfully self-policed and that if they weren’t most people wouldn’t go there.
My experience is that there isn’t really an issue, but of course my experience is confined to the places that I’ve been to.
When the UK exited lockdown and allowed restaurants/pubs/bars to open (4th July – some symbolism there?) I was involved with running a community-owned pub and took on the role of examining the regulation/guidance the government had published and ensuring our compliance with it. The relevant publication was about 130 pages long, but much of it irrelevant to small operations not employing a large staff. Not many things were mandatory, and a somewhat larger numbers of things were advised.
The key point for me was that you could not reasonably expect hospitality workers (generally minimum wage and many/most part-time) to police and enforce social distancing. These people generally do not want a confrontation as part of their job. There are some exceptions, sure, with aggressive/unpleasant personality types who relish confrontation but these are more commonly found in nightclubs/bars and certainly we had none in our operation.
We followed the guidelines, we put up clear signage saying what we were doing and why, and it turned out there was no need to police or enforce anything. No real trouble with people not observing the rules – other than perhaps the odd person we had to ask to step back from the bar – but that was force of habit or forgetfullness on their part rather than deliberate disobedience.
The only ‘trouble’ we had was with people who felt we weren’t operating a strict enough regime for their liking. I had two people (from the same group) corner me and give me the benefit of their opinions on how we should be operating. The typical uninformed rant based on stuff they’d read in the papers followed by threats to call the Police and get us shut down. I smiled politely, told them to go ahead and report us, and that if they weren’t satisfied with our Covid-19 mitigation policies then the remedy available to them was to leave.
Peter wrote:
herd immunity will now be the only way forwardVaccine…
Therapeutics
Scientists know full there are theories, hunches, ideas to which the evidence points, and hard evidence that almost certainly strongly supports a particular conclusion.
Hunches and theories are a good thing. Sometimes they prove to be right, and the hunch in the first place directs the research down the right avenue. By a hunch is not proven, until it is.
If you have no other alternative I would suggest you are better betting your life on a well thought through hunch.
However, in the situation in which we find ourselves I am far from convinced we are in this territory. We have a pretty good idea based on hard data what does and what doesnt work. Scientists and the government do us all a great disservice by giving house room to hunches, especially when hunches can be readily distinguished from proven fact without gerrymandering the data. In other words when there are those that say a particular approach is supported by the science, and it isnt, it is vital they are called out.
We are in no place to direct policy on hunches at this stage. I see no evidence that the variable lockdowns are anything more than an experiment. I see no data that proves they work by reducing the R to less than 1, or some other tolerable figure. By all means experiment, but we have to know when an experiment has been taken as far as it safely can. Unfortunately we have a government that is giving the impression the current tiered lockdowns are supported by the science. I dont beleive this is true. I beleive it is a reasonable hunch they will have an impact, but in reality we have no measure of how much of an impact and whether it will be enough. On the other hand we know a lockdown works, because it has been deployed in many settings around the world and the we have the data that results. Of all the tools in our armoury, it is the best we have, and the only way of being certain of reducing the R to low levels at the moment, anything else is an experiment, and this should be made very clear, otherwise you are lieing to the people and not following the science, you are following a hunch.
In the UK whether or not we wish to get the R back to around 1 or below is a political judgement, but any scientist that argues the current measures will achieve this is basing his assertion on a hunch, and, by not making this clear, the nation is being deceived.
If any government is to carry the population with it then it needs to be clear on these fundamentals, and I think this would avoid much of the confusion that we are currently experiencing.
Silvaire wrote:
I’m surprised that there is a UK issue with restaurant occupancy compliance
I’m not sure there is. I have limited experience with it, but on our recent maintenance trip to the UK, we went to several pubs/restaurants, from a ‘Spoons in Corby (and a Gregg’s for breakfast) at the low end to a high quality independently owned sushi place in Stamford and the establishments and patrons all were following the guidelines without fuss.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Science have not done themselfs a favour with their behaviour either.
One of the challenges is, that as much as ignoring science is a bad thing, it is also not good to take everything as granted what a “scientist” says.
Let’s face it: There are only extremely few people who are not only scientists but actually also experts in how diseases spread in a population and how this spread can be influenced.
There are scientists – some of them also very prominently featured in the media – which are unbelievable good when at molecular virology, spent their entire life on the question how a corona virus enters a cell and are real capacities when it comes to the question of how fast we can expect a vaccine on the market – but when it comes to masks, shutdown, effectiveness and impact of closure of schools, etc. they are real amateurs. It’s like if you put an 20.000hr A380 captain in a glider: Yes, he is also a pilot and he knows what that stick is for – but he will fail miserably already at the start on the winch…
EuroFlyer wrote:
As you can see, over half of infections come from the blue areas – various living areas, private households, etc. Restaurants are very unlikely places. Shutting them down – again – is not the right measure, they don’t affect the health system.
First of all: Thanks for sharing this data – very insightful.
Beyond the obvious (that most infections happen at places of living), there are som other considerations to make:
- To support your statement that “restaurants are unlikely places” one also needs to look at times spent in these settings. How much time do people spent in restaurants and how often they get infected there? It might turn out, that they are actually infection hot spots but on average we obviously only spend a very limited share of our time there
- Along the same line: It is hard to avoid to live somewhere – it is much easier to not visit the movies or dine in a restaurant. Measures that address the risk of infection in our places of living are massive and even more massive to control.
- Finally one might also look at transversal infection chains: Yes, most infections happen in the place of living, but the question is, how “local patient 0” came into that place. If I get infected in a restaurant it is very likely that this will cause 3 more infections as my household can not avoid getting it as well. If I get infected in the home it is quite likely that my infection chain is already finished because I stay at home anyways.
To cut a long story short: Restaurants (and cinemas, theaters, etc.) might not cause huge share of primary infections but those could be the places there the virus is distributed between different households.
