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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Eat Out to Help Out will go down as maybe the dumbest policy in COVID times in any nation.

They paid us to eat at restaurants ... basically the highest risk activity.

It had no real affect on R, you can see it in the data.

R shot up only during two events. Schools opening and Universities opening, and you can see this clearly on this graph someone else linked:

https://reproduction.live/world/GB

I can understand schools opening, but the devastating double peak when universities opened (Freshers week and then the 2nd/3rd years the week after) was totally avoidable.

There is minor peak at the end of August, but that is in my opinion actually holiday makers returning from infection ravaged Spain, as otherwise it would have been a month long peak.

Correlation is not causation.

Because of the UK's testing policies around only testing symptomatic individuals, it's very difficult to answer questions like this effectively.

See here for example, where it suggests that restaurants are one of the highest risk activities: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3

Three peaks which line up perfectly with three national level mixing events? That happened in all regions round the country?

Bullshit.

If you want to play with simulations that clearly do not reflect real life, go ahead, but to me the Real World data is presently showing opening unis killed 10,000s people.

And it makes sense too. Eat out to help out you stayed in your local area. The time periods were short, often outside, and many of the people mixing were already exposed to each other.

Opening universities meant 100,000s of people moved around the country, met in big groups during induction, lots of mixing of new geographic regions. The time periods were long, often inside, and all the people mixing had never been exposed to each other.

All the students are going to be sent home soon to visit their old folks at Christmas, what could possibly go wrong?

Yes, an absolute disaster and they're going to blame it on Xmas instead of the actual cause, sending the students home. And then, they're going to let them go back again 2nd week of January :'(.

And not a single newspaper is reporting about it. The media should be shouting from the rooftops day after day that the 2nd wave was caused entirely by universities reopening and yet instead they regurgitate these releases from ONS blindly.

We could have reopened schools and accepted the small increase in actual cases, kept unis online only. But by reopening schools and universities, with the two events so close to each other they compounded and caused the 2nd wave.

As a small ray of hope, I know people who work in both the unis here in Notts and they're taking it very seriously and doing mass testing before they send them home, as well as staggering them being sent back. Hopefully other unis are too.

I've heard that one of the reasons Notts infection rate shot up so high compared to nationwide is because Nottingham University were aggressively contact testing with their own labs and found many more asymptomatic cases than the national government's shambolic track and trace system is presently achieving.

That's interesting - your final paragraph implies that there's a perverse incentive for local authorities to discourage testing to avoid being locked down..

Thats really interesting, but I dont see how staggering helps. Seems better to use entry/exit quarantine. Like, online learning during the first week and last week of the semester.

Staggering helps a bit as it will mean some people who were asymptomatic become symptomatic before they go home, and they can't realistically police a quarantine of something like 60,000 - 80,000 students, of which something like 70% live off campus.

I'm not sure of the exact figures, I think Nottingham Uni has like 45k students and Nottingham Trent has about 25k.

The other thing is that the official "Nottingham City" boundary is actually quite small and has only 320k residents and I'd happily bet at least £50 that the official government figures don't include the students as residents which is why Nottingham has such a high "cases per 100,000" because the true population count is something like 25% higher than the the "official" one, artificially inflating the proportional cases count.

I think the UK government realised its mistake, and is trying to unwind it as safely as possible.

"From 3 December to 9 December, which will be known as the ‘student travel window’, students will be allowed to travel home on staggered departure dates set by universities, who will work with other institutions in the region to manage pressure on transport infrastructure.

The student travel window will mean students can travel having just completed the four-week period of national restrictions, reducing the risk of transmission to family and friends at home.

Universities should move learning online by 9 December so students can continue their education while also having the option to return home to study from there."

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/christmasguidance-set-out...

This is great. I like that the policy is named the ‘student travel window’ rather than ‘staggering’, which would be a good overall summary.

"Fresher's flu" is the name given to the phenomenon of nearly everyone at uni getting a cold when returning for the new academic semester; everyone congregating from across the country/planet brings their own strain and gives it to everyone else.

We know that this happens every year, so we knew that it would happen this year too.

We actually have an ONS-run surveillance program where they test you every week.

I know because I'm in it.

Could you look the details? How many people, where they are, what the project is called so we can see the project stats?

This is the ONS survey methodology : https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

And this is the most recent set of data : https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

Thanks, appreciated.

> Correlation is not causation.

The main problem in the "Western approach" to the pandemy has been the logic: The effect has not been rigorously proven ⇒ The effect does not exist.

All your inputs are uncertain information to varying degrees, yet you still have to decide something. And the correct strategy is not to sit put and decide nothing.

http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/trisha-greenhalgh-wil...

This sums up the climate change policies as well.

> The effect has not been rigorously proven ⇒ The effect does not exist.

There's a great article on the BBC news homepage fighting this effect now about Vitamin D.

The TL;DR is the government says "Vitamin D cannot be said to help coronavirus infections, but we strongly recommend everyone take vitamin D supplements, and it's so important we'll even give them out for free"

> actually holiday makers returning from infection ravaged Spain,

isn't this alternatively of a case of holiday makers infecting each others in droves while vacationing in all the same places in Spain?

R was lower in Spain in July and August than in the UK.

Airports and flights mix people from many different regions in close proximity.

Schools and universities open in fall, respiratory diseases usually come back in fall. Doesn't mean they are related. This virus looks fairly seasonal.

I thought you were kidding o-O

> Eligible establishments are those in which food is sold for immediate on-premises consumption.

...

> The discount cannot be applied to the following items:

> ...

> * food or drink that is to be consumed off premises

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/get-more-informat...

Holy shit that’s basically mass murder.

Tbf, it was in summer so a lot of outdoor dining options. But yes, overall, dumb.

That partially justifies discounts for eating on premises, but I cannot imagine why those would not apply for take away.

Trying to protect waiters/esses jobs, maybe?

Money for giant pub chain JD Wetherspoon owned by Tory Brexit propagandist, perhaps.

Exactly that, nominally.

Though pjc50’s comment looks pretty convincing given gov.uk could have used the same money to make it easier for businesses to restructure to offer delivery...

When Covid is over, are we still going to talk about ‘murdering grandparents’ by visiting them during seasonal flu season?

(Not comparing the two diseases, but wondering where grim Covid attitudes will persist)

The chance of dying from the seasonal flu or getting permanent health damage is significantly less.

Counted like COVID19 there are only about 15 000 who die from Seasonal Flu in the US. Compare that to the 250 000 or so dead despite massive efforts to contain COVID19.

Every single attempt to count flu deaths "like Covid-19" that I've come across compares apples to oranges in a way that downplays the number of flu deaths. There are some really critical gotchas that make apparently like-for-like comparisons misleading.

For a start, Covid-19 testing is much more widespread than flu testing. The UK has been testing everyone hospitalized for any reason for Covid, which they don't do for flu, and I think other Western countries are broadly similar. The flu tests are also less sensitive. Not only that, but because flu tends to kill more via secondary bacterial pneumonia, apparently patients don't necessarily have enough influenza virus left to test positive by the time they're hospitalized, whereas Covid causes pneumonia directly. Also, there's strong statistical evidence that flu causes heart attacks which aren't recorded as influenza deaths on things like death certificates.

The headline CDC, etc stats take all this into account to estimate the number of people who died as a result of flu, in the sense that they'd have lived if they weren't infected. The "counted like Covid-19" stats generally don't count these as flu deaths, whilst comparing with stats that count almost anyone who died after being infected with Covid-19 as a Covid-19 death regardless of whether it was directly caused by Covid in this sense. They really don't compare like with like.

From the regime which oversaw the deaths of thousands of people in 'care homes' by moving Covid-19 infected hospital patients into care homes, reducing testing in care homes as the plague exploded in March, advising against mask use for care home staff, and that "if an employee becomes unwell and believe they have been exposed to COVID-19 [...] normal practice should continue".[0]

Yes, the same regime that notoriously made the UK a sick joke around the world after openly announcing its preferred strategy of infecting as much of the population as possible with a deadly plague.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-for-soci...

"the highest risk activity" seems somewhat hyperbolic. Eating at restaurants when tables are appropriately spaced and masks are worn when not actually eating is not extremely dangerous.

Another feature of the scheme was that they made people crowd together on just three days of the week. It was absolutely packed in some places and almost empty for the rest of the week.

No, restaurants are one of the highest risk places. Spacing doesn’t help so much indoors where aerosols accumulate, especially if ventilation is poor.

We just had an outbreak in halifax and bars and restaurants have far and away been the driver.

https://fortune.com/2020/06/26/is-it-safe-restaurant-coronav...

bars and restaurants

This is a hugely different from just "restaurants", for many reasons:

- restaurants have wait staff, so the guests are much more stationary, whereas in bars every round requires a walking trip to the bar for at least one person per group.

- restaurants have tables, and the guests are usually seated, whereas bars have much more people standing around and close together.

- as a result, the people walking around in restaurants can be controlled and trained, since they are employees. In bars, the people walking around are guests.

- restaurants are a quiet atmosphere, and people at the same tables can usually have an easy conversation. In most bars, there's music blaring at loud volume so people must lean in towards each other for every sentence.

I don't see how you go from "bars and restaurants have far and away been the driver" to "restaurants are one of the highest risk places" with a straight face. Can you point to studies showing how these differences don't make a diffference?

Bars are at the very top of the list, but restaurants are also risky. You won’t find studies, to my knowledge no one has done any.

Restaurants are not usually a quiet atmosphere, at least in north america. This loud volume gets people talking more loudly. Animated talking is common in restaurants: people go to socialize, not to quietly.

Bars are worse, but lack of masks in restaurants make them much riskier than masked activities. What places would you estimate are riskier than restaurants?

I’ll grant that bars are #1, but restaurants havw got to be #5 or so. (I’m assuming also that high risk things like choirs are shut down. If not then that changes assumptions a bit)

https://ny.eater.com/2018/6/6/17429648/steve-cuozzo-noisy-re...

You don’t have to wear masks while seated in the UK

It’s a puritanical virus that only attacks people partaking in leisure activities. Apparently it leaves schools and workplaces alone...

Rather than post vague sarcasm, could you possibly provide your alternate interpretation?

Might be referring to this, in part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25236522

There's quite a lot of disagreement about this [1] but it does seem that in general long distance travel is worse.

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/28/why-euro... (paywalled, key graphic is this: https://i.imgur.com/JpmZtPk.jpeg )

Secondary schools and student accommodation seemed to be higher risk.

20%+ of secondary school kids absent (isolating, ill, or being kept away), but they still stubbornly insist on keeping them open.

"Stubbornly insist that children get an education" being the other way to look at it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com