Utilising surgery’s was a suggestion by David King , the ex head of SAGE.
Point taken on mixing though. It is a fair and valid one. I still think there is a better compromise though as the infrastructure a procedures are in place for testing. I personally dont like reinventing the wheel.
In my local super the other day…2 pensioners kept shuffling over the 2 metre markers getting nearer to me, no masks. When I asked them to move back I was shouted at ,in no uncertain terms , and told to hurry up…my retort was: I keeping 2 metres away and wearing a mask to save your lives…Rude People.
How lucky are New Zealand to have a semi competent Government. If only the UK was that lucky 
I’m curious as to what the UK public would have the government do NOW. The endgame in this has to be a vaccine. So do we lockdown completely till then? Open the gates a little? Shut the schools? Cancel holidays? Put Christmas on ice? Prosecute my nephew for being in a different house every week nobing his missus? Close booze only pubs (because no fucker needs those)?
What would you actually do now?
At some point, we need to start thinking about what this looks like if there is no vaccine, at least in the sense of one that provides indefinite immunity.
Great question.
I wonder what those that were hammered outside the pubs last night would think? Just before they popped to the supermarket and stocked up for the house party.
If I were an utterly dispassionate dictator, I’d scrap all the rules and get back to normal now. People die (probably my mum and dad) for the greater good.
Even I couldn’t do that and I’m a cold hearted bastard at times. But the bigger picture must be seen.
But that isn’t the big picture. The big picture is that despite the number of people who are currently being lax over following public health measures, society is still acting in an overall more reserved way that will continue to see business suffer relative to normal. As long as there continues to a pandemic that invisibly maims and kills, we will be a in a long drawn out economic slump.
I think this is the position I have come to from this week.
The massive fallacy in this covidiot line of argument is the conception that this is somehow like some gigantic nightmarish game of tag or hide-and-seek, where you play once and when you get caught, you pay a penalty somewhere along the continuum from ‘bad flu’ to ‘dead’. Then you don’t have to play any more.
It isn’t. The likelihood is that re-infections will become so commonplace over the next few months as to no longer be noteworthy. The bigger picture is that the ‘we have to crack on’ morons are becoming habituated to what amounts to a predator, much like the rabbits of Cowslip’s warren in Watership Down, mentally habituating themselves to the idea being able to live a ‘normal life’ this week is a reasonable trade-off for a few deaths, until it happens to them.
And during the metal break, where Governments are failing miserably, the void for thinking is being filled by right wing extremism.
Certainly in Ireland protest is infiltrated by idiocy, racism, homophobia and anti migrant diatribe.
We have social media experts telling us not to wear masks based on false science whilst blithely suggesting that the migrants are bring covid to the country.
I genuinely despair.
Given the blatant stupidity of the general public, if the government removed all regs tomorrow, do you not think that 80% + of people would immediately go back to normal?
Even 80% of the public going back to normal still does not get the economy back to where it was at the same point last year. Especially not in the absence of actual real improvements in our public health metrics around the virus.
I think there’s a lot of people back to normal already.
As soon as you open schools and essentially push people back to work I dont think there’s anything left to stop the decline into ignoring the risks.
Or you don’t have much of a choice than to just accept certain risks, especially in some professional settings. And even in private/social contexts it’s getting increasingly diffcult without turning into some Debbie Downer character.
True.
Imagine a person having to catch a train into work every day within a city centre, before spending all day in a busy work place. You’d quickly lose any focus on the risks.
Once things start to improve, I suspect public spending in the UK will go through the roof and the economy flourish. We can hope.
You mean the billionaires who benefit from public spending can hope. 
Highly unlikely.
With the amount of spending the government have done over the last 6 months in regards to Furlough, Rent Proptection, I can see taxes going through the roof and public spending to be cut to a bare minimum to try and claw back all the cash they’ve been paying out
Raising taxes during a recession is not a great idea i believe.
I suspect it will be austerity mk2 where pubkic services get hammered and the door left open for more public money to be syphoned off to private enterprise. Brexit will do the same. That’s the UK. Cany vouch for sensible countries