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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

I live in London. The core issue here is that the government hasn't really taken any action. There are "rules" but they are full of loopholes and totally unenforced.

2 cases in particular stand out to me:

Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to why you're not wearing a mask.

Supermarkets continue to be rammed, but staff aren't required to wear masks. Nor are they enforcing the requirement on customers beyond the door. One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning. Wtf aren't staff required to wear masks?

The attitude here is rapidly becoming "why should I bother if no one else is?". And frankly, I think the government know and encourage this. Its all but policy. Time and again we see them decline scientific advice, then act surprised when infection rates spike.

I'm especially frustrated as my best friend lives in Melbourne. Despite lockdown starting at basically the same time, and some crazy bad luck/incidents, Melbourne is back to BAU.

View on HN

Also in London and 100% agree. I’ve barely been to a shop in 8 months because of this.

For some reason we can manage to prevent drunk agro people entering a club with the wrong shoes, but 8 months into a pandemic we can’t make people wear a bloody mask? It’s insane.

The government are partly to blame for making rules so haphazardly that even someone like me who reads EVERYTHING and wants to do the right thing 100% of the time finds them hard to be sure of.

But ultimately people have to start taking the blame for not even doing the basics or following the letter of the law but not the spirit - nose slingers are the prime example of this.

I’ve just decided to go my own much more stringent path and ignore dumb government advice.

I've heard how to wear an aircraft oxygen mask a hundred times in my life but never a PSA on how to wear a COVID mask. One I hope never to do and the other I do every week at least.

This I have MOPP training and just flew though two airports I saw 0 people probably useing a mask.

> For some reason we can manage to prevent drunk agro people entering a club with the wrong shoes

At least in the US, dress codes in nightclubs exist as a deterrent to individuals with gang affiliations. It's pretty racist.

Guess which race anti-maskers are predominantly.

Wow. Here in deepest Republican middle America mask wearing by _staff_ in supermarkets is universal. Customers around 90% if you count "nose-slingers" as non compliant. Pretty much nobody just swanning around with no mask these days. Costco has heavy mask enforcement -- they will hunt down and eject anyone with their nose out.

Where masks are not worn here is in smaller family owned businesses. Some have notices requiring masks on the door, some (many) do not, even though it's a state mandate.

Since this is the US, we have no public transport so I can't comment on that.

Here in the liberal northwest, where we at least have a token amount of public transport, I see the bus signs alternating between their usual route number + description and "masks required". Haven't been on one to verify use by ridership, or to see what the driver's reaction to noncompliant riders is. The higher staff-to-rider ratio might help?

Outdoor mask use is limited (50%?) but at least quite sparse and distant (it's pretty cold, and wet, and everyone drives anyways.) Indoors the numbers are much higher (I'm guessing at least 90%), including for smaller businesses. I'm trying to think of a single business around here (small or large) without at least a sign saying you need to mask up before entry, and I'm drawing a blank. Several have soap dispensers too, and haphazard plexiglass sheets to help physically separate staff from customers.

Food is strictly delivery and take-out. Even when dine-in was still AFAIK legal, some places had it already voluntarilly closed off anyways.

> Haven't been on one to verify use by ridership, or to see what the driver's reaction to noncompliant riders is.

Compliance is very high (>95%?), but the people who do not comply are basically the same people who were problems in the Before Times: belligerent, mentally ill, or both. The drivers almost always let them get away with it, again just as in the Before Times, probably because it's a risk to even interact with these people. I, for one, try very hard not to make eye contact with them or even look in their general direction; treating them like the Bugblatter Beast of Traal is at least moderately effective.

I do wish they wouldn't flash the stupid "Masks Required" on the route signs so often, though. It makes it a lot harder to tell which bus is actually arriving. And showing it on the route indicator on the _back_ of the coach is just spiteful.

> the people who do not comply are basically the same people who were problems in the Before Times: belligerent, mentally ill, or both.

Or maybe they're one of 12,943 medical and public health scientists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration [0].

[0] ; https://gbdeclaration.org/

The declaration you linked seems to be more about lockdown policy and doesn't even mention masks.

It at least mentions:

> Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold.

Wearing a mask seems like a simple hygine measure to me.

Perhaps a signator might not wear a mask as a measure of protest against government "overreach", disregarding that part of the declaration, disregarding the law, and disregarding the risk of their actions to the health of their fellow citizens.

That last bit seems rather hostile. Rather belligerent. So I think we're right back to square one.

There are reasonable discussions and lawsuits to be had about how far is too far, and what reasonable public policy looks like. Even arguing on the internet sounds more productive to me than not wearing a mask as "protest" though.

I don’t know where either of the London-based commenters go shopping but all staff are legally required to wear masks at shops in the U.K.

Im in Scotland, at my local coop the staff hardly ever wear masks. Twice ive seen them have conversations with people just hanging at the till who arent wearing masks eithet.

Visit any of the major supermarket brands in London and I guarantee you'll see a handful of staff or security not or not properly wearing a mask.

Not sure about other retailers, but the one I work for (300+ stores and still expanding) doesn't really allow us to enforce such mask mandates. Sure, we have a sign posted that says you need a mask, but it's an understood no-no to push any further than asking if they want one for fear of customer complaints to corporate. Because even when the customer is wrong, they're still "right" (which is utter garbage).

I got chided at Costco for bringing in my five year old without a mask (she’d broken the straps on the ride there), even though the state mandate here is for ages above five. Costco employee said nope, in here anyone two and over needs a mask. So I had to impromptu tie up an adult mask’s ear straps to accommodate her, and go in with a lot of crying on her part because my first try was too tight.

Yup, same. I live in Idaho, and you’ve got to be out in the boonies before mask compliance for the customer base falls below 50%. I’ve not seen a single staff member not wearing a mask so far. But I’ve also avoided stores that culturally would be anti-mask, to be fair. I’d probably have a different take if I’d visited say, a gun store.

For gun stores, auto repair shops and the like, I adopt the approach that supposedly it takes 15 minutes of close exposure to become infected (obviously probabilistically), so if I absolutely must visit one of those places I aim to be in and out in less than 10 minutes.

I was on a flight from Abu Dhabi to Frankfurt last month. The moron in the next counter traveling to Paris literally told the check-in counter employees that he had Covid and asked whether he could travel.

I don't know, I'd like to call this Angevin idiocy or something. But yeah, Europe does have its fair share of covidiots too.

> Since this is the US, we have no public transport

What do you mean you have no public transport? Is it cancelled because of covid?

Public transport doesn't really exist in the US, outside of major cities. In non-urban areas, if there's a bus at all, it'll be like one token bus route that takes a roundabout path to nowhere in particular and comes once every 3 hours.

Yes, we have some bus services (Greyhound, like in the movies, and a bus that goes between towns once a day) but I've never been on one and don't know anyone who has. Kids begin driving age 16 and under that age are typically driven places by a friend or parent, so there's not much need for busses.

Also: younger kids are ferried back and forth to school in special yellow busses that are only used for school service. So actually there _is_ a widespread public transport service all over the US but people don't think of it as such because it's run by the schools and only usable by school kids. Some companies run their own busses too for their workers, to and from the plant, to suit shift hours.

There's often a service providing rides on demand:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#Un...

(typically with subsidies or other provisions for paratransit)

And covid is devastating the fare income for public transit. The systems need more money because of it, but will obviously get less.

"nose slingers"

That’s a nice phrase. In my group we called it “dick-nosing” - iirc it came about due to:

1) you wouldn’t (shouldn’t?) go around with your dick hanging out of your trousers, so why would you do the same with your nose and your mask

2) you’re a dick if you do this

A decent amount of it is unintentional I suspect. Subconcious fiddling, poor feeling / awareness of slipping masks... a gentle reminder that "your mask has slipped a bit" can do wonders.

Similarly, a gentle reminder when one's dick accidentally slips out of one's trousers is also appreciated.

Too rarely does good, cutting satire grace HN.

Some responses to that will be (in the spirit of) coughing in the speaker's face.

So far nobody's coughed in my face, in spirit or otherwise.

Seen a guy on the street taking off mask to do giant sneeze, put it back on afterwards promptly. His wife facepalmed. To his defence he’d probably have to wear juicy mask if he didn’t do it.

My interpretation is that this is referring to those individuals who are wearing a surgical type mask, with the top of the mask resting on their upper lip and their nose not covered by the mask.

Yes. I get the impression that often they simply don't know how to put these masks on -- you need to pull them apart somewhat so they extend from the nose bridge to the chin. If you don't know that's how they're fitted, you'll end up with either of the nose or bottom of the mouth uncovered.

Staff enforcement is much easier in the US since losing your job results in homelessness.

The US has a homelessness rate of 6.2%, while the UK has a homelessness rate of 7.7%.

That's actually nonsense for the UK, as the real figure is 280,000 which includes people in temporary accommodation, which is provided by the government.

In the UK if someone is on the street and needs a place to stay there are shelters in every town. Nationally there are about 4,000 people that sleep rough, although most of the people that do suffer from addiction or mental illness. Many choose not to go to shelters because you have to be sober to stay in them.

That is astonishingly high and may be counted differently (people living insecurely on couches)

Not sure about the UK, but any kind of insecure or temporary housing is counted for the US - including people living on couches.

Using what metric?

To use a local(ish) example to me, Multnomah County in Oregon has about 815K people, and 3800 that are either living on the streets, in a shelter, or in temporary housing. That's 0.4%. Portland is known for having a homeless problem.

One in around fourteen? I don't need to look anything up to know that's way off, in both countries. I doubt that can even count as 'misleading'.

It surprises people to hear this, but mask compliance in the US is better than most of all of Europe. People still get the virus though, because it’s almost never spread through community but rather face-to-face unmasked indoor contact, which is something people will never give up.

> Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%

where? my counter-anecdote is I've taken to counting everyone on the carriage I'm on (between zone 2 and 1), and it's never more than 2-3 people without a mask, something like 90-95% compliance (seems down from a few months ago, though). in supermarkets it seems higher than that, to the extent I was quite weirded out to see a single person not wearing a mask last week.

TFL Rail, the Eastern half, Romford, Chadwell Heath etc. To be fair, it got better on the central line. This was mid day not commuter rush. I do think East London is pretty poor at compliance culturally...

This is my observation too. Compliance varies across different parts of London. I was quite surprised to be the only person wearing a mask in a busy Tesco Local in East London several weeks after they were first mandated. In comparison, in far South East London it's unusual to see someone without a mask shopping.

The train i catch in SE London is travelling from tier 3 (Kent) to tier 2 (tiers as of the last few weeks). Despite travel out of a tier 3 are being 'advised against', the train is busy, 1/3 of people not wearing a mask, 1/3 not wearing it correctly, all the windows closed because it's 'cold'.

It depends a lot on what time you take the train IME. At 8am it's nearly 100%, on a Friday evening it's closer to 20%.

And of course on the rare occasion a staff member challenges someone not wearing a mask, they claim they're exempt and don't have to provide any proof.

I agree. I would estimate about 90% both on the tube and supermarkets. Perhaps if varies by area somewhat?

Are you serious? The tube and overground is about 25% no masks in the morning for me.

very serious, during the day and evening, between zone 1 and eastern zone 2, I see extremely high compliance. it appears to vary enormously by area, which is very surprising to me.

Also a Londoner. Whilst I've observed greater mask compliance, shops, cafes, bars and restaurants have been packed. I've been to bars freely serving alcohol with no need to buy food, just like the old days. Definitely seeing rule breaking.

And I've had a friend who wanted to beat the travel restrictions by leaving London before midnight. That's rule beating.

I see it everywhere.

A PSA because it's important: I can promise future you would rather remember "dang, do you remember that shit Christmas we had to stay home?" over "dang, do you remember that shit Christmas that someone accidentally gave Mum covid and she died because we REALLY wanted Christmas with the family in the middle of a pandemic". It really isn't worth it. Not right now. Just be patient and wait.

I’m genuinely quite shocked that bars are still serving alcohol at all. A quick glance at a typical bar bathroom should tell you everything you need to know about how safety conscious everyone is going to be after they’ve had 3 drinks.

Go and gather in groups where all are below 50 with no underlying conditions, instead.

Some of you will still get Long Covid, which may leave you with permanent breathing issues and other health problems.

The biggest lie is that if you're under 30 you're immune. You're not - not even slightly. You're far less likely to die than someone who is 85 and obese with diabetes and high blood pressure. But no one knows what the long term health implications are for younger people who make a partial recovery. And there's been a non-negligible number of those.

Given the rates, though, it basically seems worth the risk if the alternative is to lose a year of say, your 20's. You have to weigh up the expectation costs in quality-adjusted life years, with associated error bars.

This is interesting. What are the stats (percentages) on those who get "Long Covid" by age group?

I don't have the age breakdown but serious/long Covid is about 15% of cases, which is potentially millions of people in most countries if we let the epidemic rip through. Symptoms include mental fog, loss of concentration, extreme fatigue, loss of smell..

This is why the idea of chasing herd immunity without a vaccine has always been misguided

You seem to be combining “serious” and “long” cases together. We already know that the vast majority of “serious” cases occur in the elderly/sickly, so your statistic of 15% is useless FUD.

Regarding your PSA: In the mean time Taiwan has not had a quarantine at all, and has been free of (internal) Covid for over 200 days. Other SE-Asian countries are all doing very well, Japan for example does not have quarantine either.

European lock-down policies have been a monumental failure. Not good enough to stop the spread. But ruining the economy (and everybody's fun). It is truly remarkable that Europeans agree with being locked away for nearly one year now with little to show for, while other societies achieve much better results with different, and less drastic measures. No curiosity at all, it seems, even to understand why Taiwan, Japan and other countries succeed! SMH

> the under 20s almost completely ignore covid restrictions, and so does a substantial part of the under 30s. I can't even blame them as it doesn't affect them.

I think it's less because the disease doesn't affect them, and more because the restrictions do. If you're living as a family unit then restrictions are tough, but it's something else entirely if you're a single person living alone (or with people you don't like).

Indeed I've seen a similar attitude (although perhaps less actual rule breaking) from at-risk old people saying damn the rules, they'd like to see their relatives.

Not that I think this excuses it.

Londoner here too and I agree with your observations about compliance. Tons of rule breaking. The dance studio next to my dwelling has been running popular dance classes as recently as last night. I think it's mostly an age thing: the under 20s almost completely ignore covid restrictions, and so does a substantial part of the under 30s. I can't even blame them as it doesn't affect them. And they mostly lack an understanding of the concept of asymptomatic carrier. Regarding your PSA: In the mean time Taiwan has not had a quarantine at all, and has been free of (internal) Covid for over 200 days. Other SE-Asian countries are all doing very well, Japan for example does not have quarantine either.

European lock-down policies have been a monumental failure. Not good enough to stop the spread. But ruining the economy (and everybody's fun). It is truly remarkable that Europeans agree with being locked away for nearly one year now with little to show for, while other societies achieve much better results with different, and less drastic measures. No curiosity at all, it seems, even to understand why Taiwan, Japan and other countries succeed! SMH

Some countries have done better than others. Spain, France, and Italy have all done badly, but Germany and Portugal have much better outcomes than the UK.

The point about test and trace plus limited lockdowns is that you can play whack-a-mole with clusters, which does a far better job of preventing transmission than anything short of a vaccine.

Countries with aggressive test and trace and compulsory self-isolation have done best of all - and with limited economic damage.

None of this should be rocket science, but apparently it's not a priority for the UK government which has literally used a deadly pandemic as an excuse to hand out billions of pounds of public cash to mates, cronies, and party donors. With no expectation of any effective service provision in return.

Literally. That is not exaggeration in any way. It's on the record - including some court records - that the UK gov has been doing this.

  aggressive test and trace 
  compulsory self-isolation

Yes.

An interesting question is why that has not been possible in European countries. A high-ranking politician of my acquaintance stated privately, and very clearly, that it was exaggerated concern for privacy (of a population that has no concern using the products of Facebook, Google and similar trackers, not to mention mobile phones), stoked by a "privacy maffia", made meaningful test and trace (along the lines of Taiwan and other SE Asian states) political suicide, which is why him and others, despite knowing better, did not bother floating this.

Masks might slow it, but they're everywhere in the Bay Area, and cases are rising faster than ever, and we're setting new records for new cases, so "just wear a mask in public" isn't enough.

Masks in public can only help so much when the major source of the spike in cases is individuals gathering in private settings without masks.

I think the argument is that masks are an essentially effortless tactic, and if people can't even bother to put them on and the government doesn't seem to care very much, then what hope is there for more effective measures?

I don't live in the UK, just explaining how I read this comment.

> I think the argument is that masks are an essentially effortless tactic

Masks are effortless, but there is also a lot of reason to believe they are not nearly as effective as was sold to people in the early summer.

At some point we get into "just wear a crucifix to ward off the Devil" territory of superstition.

Masks are obviously helpful at preventing transmission of some illnesses, but I've seen enough evidence that Coronavirus spreads via aerosol to not really trust the things.

> there is also a lot of reason to believe they are not nearly as effective as was sold to people in the early summer.

Mayeb you can post some (preferably peer-reviewed) literature links that show "a lot of reason" to believe this.

The only peer-reviewed RCT ever conducted for Covid-19 and masks found no statistically significant protective effect:

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

That is not an accurate summary of the study. Emphasis mine:

> Limitation: Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others.

> The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use. The data were compatible with lesser degrees of self-protection.

I don't think any public health experts are saying "wear a mask and you'll be safe", they're saying "if everybody wears a mask, that will slow the infection rate". A study of a community with "uncommon general mask use" does not dispute this.

Finally, I don't think it's clear that a randomized controlled trial is the best method to answer this question. Aside from ethical concerns, you can't give someone a placebo mask. Shouldn't we assume that people will behave differently when they're wearing a mask?

I made an accurate summary of the study. From the Results:

"Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."

The points you are raising about limitations in no way affect the conclusion of the work. Short of putting infected people in a room with uninfected people, there is no ethical way to test the hypothesis that "masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others".

But since it's pretty unlikely that masks are effective in one direction only, this is the highest-quality evidence we have that they have no effect in one of the two directions.

> Finally, I don't think it's clear that a randomized controlled trial is the best method to answer this question.

A randomized controlled trial is always the gold standard for an intervention of this sort. But yeah, you can't do one for that hypothesis. So you're stuck with something that is fundamentally un-falsifiable. The best you can do is try to do what people have done so far: look at populations, and see if mask mandates make any difference, or ask people who caught Covid if they wore masks, or do similar things within families.

This is called retrospective cohort analysis, and it is low-quality evidence, at best.

> Aside from ethical concerns, you can't give someone a placebo mask. Shouldn't we assume that people will behave differently when they're wearing a mask?

Yes, we should assume that this might happen. It could well be true that wearing a mask makes people be more careless about distancing, for example. This is called "risk compensation", and is a well-known phenomenon in public health.

It seems to me that you're trying to fight two battles at once.

  1. do masks inhibit production of and exposure to aerosols carrying SARS-COV-2? This seems (to me) to me clearly established, and essentially irrefutable.

  2. do mask mandates reduce the spread of COVID19? this is an entirely different question, and has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the abilities of masks referenced in (1) above.

I would suggest that we know that the answer to (1) is yes, without doubt, but we have only hand-wavy answers to (2). That's still quite different from what you're claiming.

> do masks inhibit production of and exposure to aerosols carrying SARS-COV-2? This seems (to me) to me clearly established, and essentially irrefutable.

Aerosols? It's far from established. In fact, it's a dubious claim, unless you're far more specific about what you mean by "masks". The best laboratory studies show that properly fitted respirators (i.e. as used in hospitals), can reduce aerosol emissions. But few people are wearing respirators, and essentially nobody is fitting them correctly.

Cloth masks? Surgical masks? Cup masks? About the only claim you can make is that they might reduce heavy droplets and then, only by about 30% or so. There's no reason to believe they have any effect on aerosol emission.

Michael Osterholm covered this extensively:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/specia...

Anyone who has done a mask fitting -- where they put you in a room with vaporized stuff that you can taste to detect leaks -- will tell you how difficult it is to get an aerosol-resistant seal on a mask. The chances that the general public is doing it is 0%.

Here's the CDC:

---------------

Data regarding the “real-world” effectiveness of community masking are limited to observational and epidemiological studies.

    * An investigation of a high-exposure event, in which 2 symptomatically ill hair stylists interacted for an average of 15 minutes with each of 139 clients during an 8-day period, found that none of the 67 clients who subsequently consented to an interview and testing developed infection. The stylists and all clients universally wore masks in the salon as required by local ordinance and company policy at the time.

    * In a study of 124 Beijing households with > 1 laboratory-confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 infection, mask use by the index patient and family contacts before the index patient developed symptoms reduced secondary transmission within the households by 79%.

    * A retrospective case-control study from Thailand documented that, among more than 1,000 persons interviewed as part of contact tracing investigations, those who reported having always worn a mask during high-risk exposures experienced a greater than 70% reduced risk of acquiring infection compared with persons who did not wear masks under these circumstances.

    * A study of an outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an environment notable for congregate living quarters and close working environments, found that use of face coverings on-board was associated with a 70% reduced risk.

    * Investigations involving infected passengers aboard flights longer than 10 hours strongly suggest that masking prevented in-flight transmissions, as demonstrated by the absence of infection developing in other passengers and crew in the 14 days following exposure.

Seven studies have confirmed the benefit of universal masking in community level analyses: in a unified hospital system, a German city, a U.S. state, a panel of 15 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. as well as both Canada and the U.S. nationally. Each analysis demonstrated that, following directives from organizational and political leadership for universal masking, new infections fell significantly. Two of these studies and an additional analysis of data from 200 countries that included the U.S. also demonstrated reductions in mortality. An economic analysis using U.S. data found that, given these effects, increasing universal masking by 15% could prevent the need for lockdowns and reduce associated losses of up to $1 trillion or about 5% of gross domestic product.

------------

Taken from: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/masking-scien...

> in a unified hospital system, a German city, a U.S. state, a panel of 15 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. as well as both Canada and the U.S. nationally. Each analysis demonstrated that, following directives from organizational and political leadership for universal masking, new infections fell significantly. Two of these studies and an additional analysis of data from 200 countries that included the U.S. also demonstrated reductions in mortality. An economic analysis using U.S. data found that, given these effects, increasing universal masking by 15% could prevent the need for lockdowns and reduce associated losses of up to $1 trillion or about 5% of gross domestic product.

All of these studies were conducted on data from the spring, when cases were declining across the northern hemisphere. How are these places doing now?

DC: up dramatically

https://covid-19.direct/metro/DC

Canada: all-time highs

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/canada/

Germany: all-time highs

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/

US nationally: all-time highs

https://covid-19.direct/US

California: all-time highs

https://covid-19.direct/state/CA

New York: up dramatically

https://covid-19.direct/state/NY

Boston (where the "unified hospital system" was located): near all-time highs

https://covid-19.direct/metro/Boston

I could go on.

Anyone who attempted to conduct a similar analysis today would have to credibly conclude that masks have no protective effect whatsoever. But who knows...maybe they slightly alter the slope of the curve. It's impossible to tell without a controlled trial.

The german paper is particularly ironic, given that it was published approximately concurrently with a huge increase in diagnosed cases in the same city, which is now at all-time highs for the year:

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/12/02/2015954117

https://gesundheit.jena.de/en/coronavirus

> Anyone who attempted to conduct a similar analysis today would have to credibly conclude that masks have no protective effect whatsoever.

Absolutely not the case. It would be just as credible, as has been noted by others in the comments here, to suggest that the major cause of spread is unmasked private gatherings.

> But who knows...maybe they slightly alter the slope of the curve. It's impossible to tell without a controlled trial.

I agree that without controlled trials, it is very difficult to tell definitively. That does not, however, translate into "there are lots of reasons to doubt ..."

There was a empirical trail in Denmark. The difference between infection ratio and wearing a mask vs the control group was not significant.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

Infection with SARS-CoV-2 occurred in 42 participants recommended masks (1.8%) and 53 control participants (2.1%). The between-group difference was −0.3 percentage point (95% CI, −1.2 to 0.4 percentage point; P = 0.38) (odds ratio, 0.82 [CI, 0.54 to 1.23]; P = 0.33). Multiple imputation accounting for loss to follow-up yielded similar results. Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.

No statistically significant protective effect for the wearer, but as the study points out, it says nothing about protection of those around the wearer, which is the commonly accepted reason for mask wearing.

For what it's worth, this doesn't mean anything (by this I mean that literally, you have gained zero bits of information from this result, and should be exactly as confident as you were before the study)

You are misrepresenting the results.

“ Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.”

Read the latter half of that sentence again. Think about what it means. You can't just pay attention to the part of the sentence that you like, and ignore the other parts.

Also, I quoted this exact line in a comment below, so I'm not sure how you can credibly claim that I'm "mis-representing" something.

They obviously don't offer 100% protection. Though I've heard a nice analogy by Christian Drosten on the popular German coronavirus podcast:

Imagine you are standing close to someone at a party who starts talking to you. You immediately notice their bad breath (~aerosols). Now imagine they are wearing a mask, then imagine you both are. How much of the bad breath would you still notice in each case? That's the effect of masks.

Those sorts of comparisons are good at making the mechanism or action understandable, but that's about it. The huge thing they miss is if masks only somewhat effective, but people wearing them act like they're moderately effective. The real-world, systemic parts of this is where it gets complicated and interesting.

Lots of things are "effortless tactics". If they don't work, it's just superstition. People will figure it out, and they'll stop believing you. If you have indoor mask mandates, and outside mask mandates, and shut down restaurants, and curfews, etc., and your cases are still shooting up, you're going to have a hard time getting faith in your actions.

So much of what governments are doing in response to this are just cargo cult science. We've had ample time to run proper controlled trials for much of this stuff -- the Danes were able to do so with masks [1], and there was a big study of gyms out of Norway [2] -- it's simply pathetic that our governments mostly haven't bothered.

[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.24.20138768v...

Masks can make a significant difference when new cases per infection is near 1. Dropping it from 3 to 2 doesn’t matter has that’s still heavy exponential growth, dropping it from 0.5 to 0.25 again doesn’t matter because it’s dropping fast. However dropping from 1.05 to even 0.95 is huge.

In theory, any tiny reduction in infection rate can make the decisive difference when the number of new infections from each existing infection is close enough to one. In practice, this is extremely unlikely to work in the real world because in reality, this is not some universal constant that is fixed at a particular value everywhere by some physical law - it varies from place to place, from job to job, from community to community, and the ones where it's below 1 will end up representing an exponentially smaller fraction of cases compared to the ones where it's above 1 meaning that the overall average won't stay below 1 for long.

Treating R, the number of infections from each case, as though it was the same everywhere is just a way of simplifying the model, but the map is not the territory and we need to be a lot more careful about whether our simplifying assumptions change the overall behaviour of the system being modelled than we have been.

It’s not about an abstract model, there are feedback loops involved. Shutdowns and people’s behavior responds to the number of new infections. Globally across the last 6 months, new infections are close to 1:1 because you don’t exponential growth. Just look at the three waves in the US.

In effect masks buy you a more open environment where people can leave their homes and do more stuff. Further, when locations decide to shutdown that shutdown is more effective.

Nothing I wrote was an argument about masks. I linked to the one RCT on masks (as PPE) done in 2020, to illustrate that it's possible to do high-quality studies of these kinds of interventions, and underline the point that politicians are mostly just guessing, and people can see this.

You're grinding an axe here, but it has little to do with what I wrote.

"so "just wear a mask in public" isn't enough."

Did someone claim it was? The name of the game is and has always been suppressing the transmission rate of the virus. Masks are a low impact way to help a little bit towards that goal, nothing more.

I was responding to someone in London saying they don't see most people wearing masks in public places. They didn't explicitly say it was enough, but since that was their main criticism of how London is responding, it read like that.

Here's what Biden said:

> The first day I'm inaugurated to say I'm going to ask the public for 100 days to mask. Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days.

Again, he didn't say that wearing a mask is enough, but with the 100-day timeline, reading between the lines, he's saying it will drive down the case count.

Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days

It started as just two weeks to flatten the curve, remember.

Same here in Massachusetts. Universal masking since May 6th, the governor even did away with "except of >6ft from others when outside rule" in the beginning of November, and we're seeing more cases than ever.

Could it be ocular transmission?

https://www.ajmc.com/view/can-wearing-eyeglasses-mitigate-co...

I don't know, Melbourne is A-Okay. They'd have been that way much earlier if it wasn't for one major super spreader event.

It's nearly summer there. Respiratory viruses are far more common in winter. I feel this fact is conspicuously absent from talk of Australia.

Your timing is out.

Melbourne started their lockdown in winter. Everyone obeyed it. It was strongly enforced [1, 2]. They beat coronavirus. And now they can enjoy their summer.

I live in London. At one point in the summer, our covid rates were lower than Melbourne's. But the UK's messaging was confused and contradictory ("eat out to help out", test and trace was shambolic, rules were not enforced). So no one is the least surprised that it has got out of control again so quickly.

[1] My parents live half an hour's drive from Melbourne. Police stopped every car on the highways to enforce no travel, fined the drivers and made them turn back home.

[2] One party of 26 people got busted ordering KFC to the same address and fined $26,000.

But numbers seem to be up again, this article is speaking of another lockdown: https://t.co/2S9b4HfUhg

from that link:

>The Avalon cluster has grown to 38, with 21 out of yesterday's 23 cases linked to it and another two still under investigation.

It isn't fair and might not even be entirely honest to describe this to a (mostly US) audience with a phrase like "numbers seem to be up again".

The trigger for Australia to go back into lockdown would be considered a giant fat ignorable nothingburger in almost every part of the US.

That’s a very weak argument. The “numbers went up” from single digits to 34, from a single outbreak that is actively being traced.

For context, that's in another state and the number has rose from 0 > 35 so its still manageable. You can't even remotely compare that to UK.

I don't think I was, but every journey starts with the first step ;-). I think the Australian confidence of 'having eradicated covid' is misplaced. You can only eradicate a virus if you do that worldwide, and given viruses' capability of mutating, I think that's an unattainable goal.

That's in Sydney, which is over 700km away. It is also nothing like the scale that the UK is dealing with and will hopefully be dealt with by a short lockdown - possibly not even of the entire city of the politicians pull their finger out quickly enough.

Yeah, raarts is trying to burn us by taking this sudden reappareance of a whole 30 cases in NSW seriously. Because here in Australia we take it that seriously.

Short lockdown maybe, back to normal soon, not too many other places will be able to brag about that.

We will be able to save all the lives prior to vaccination that nations with less willpower seem willing to spend.

Aggressive contact tracing works when the disease is at low levels.

So Australia (Melbourne at the time) and the UK had basically the same case reports per day in July. One place crushed it, the other didn’t.

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/drericlevi/status/132282229786701...

[1] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...

Firstly, the UK response has been terrible, Australia far better.

However there are several contributing factors and it certainly doesn’t come down to mask use as the primary one as mask discipline in the UK hasn’t been bad in my experience.

This is a seasonal disease (the main reason for the UK summer reprieve), and it’s now summer in Australia, and they have also been far better at quarantines and contact tracing and have used this period wisely to get the disease under control. All these factors matter in a response, and the UK has suffered from panic management and a lack of difficult measures at the right time and is now entering the peak season for this sort of virus so things will get worse for a month or two at least, even with a new lockdown.

Contract tracing wasn't very effective. What worked in Melbourne was that 8 months of house arrest for everyone living in the city...

I'm all for managing the virus spread but if the policies are a piece of meat, in the UK the policies are uncooked in Melbourne they were burnt.

> What worked in Melbourne was that 8 months of house arrest for everyone living in the city...

The .au epidemiologists I've heard on NPR have made it clear that what worked in Melbourne was everything they did, including a lockdown and including contact tracing.

Exactly, there is no one magic bullet. The changing seasons probably helped too.

If only the UK had the same level of government as Melbourne and Singapore and Japan and South Korea and New Zealand and all the other places that did that...

I'm not sure that's completely fair. Countries vary so much that putting it down to "the government" ignores all the other factors. You're examples are all on the southern hemisphere, with mostly nice weather where people spend more time outside. General population health also has a massive effect. Here in the UK we are a nation of overweight old people, but fat-shaming is a thing so that's only going to get worse.

But those antipodean countries are all coming out of their winter. So they got through the worst of it during the coldest part of the year, with more people indoors, and only now are getting into summer.

I'm not sure about those other countries, but an Australian "winter" is very different from a British winter.

As I said - there are other factors here (many more than I mentioned) - that you can't compare countries so easily.

Agree with you in principle, except that Japan and Korea are at temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere.

Not sure why you are all focusing on my example with the weather. Like I said there are many factors involved here, with the weather being one of them.

I completely agree with your overall point, that there are too many confounding factors to reliably attribute anything to government actions. I guess I just couldn't resist the urge to nit.

Isn’t slowing it the whole point, especially now with vaccines in the horizon? Slow it enough so that

1) hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and

2) less people die unnecessarily

the concept of velocity is too hard for people to grasp

they need binary good/bad cause/effect edicts, like children. state and municipal governments are poorly catering to their own velocity based directives, and the juvenile more simplistic expectations of their population.

They aren’t everywhere in the Bay Area by a long shot. They aren’t even everywhere in SF...

Every store I've gone in has required them, I've heard mass transit is a lot less crowded and also requires them, and I think county rules mandate them in those cases. I've seen people without them going on outdoor walks, but that's an incredibly low-risk activity.

Try smaller stores. Gas stations, corner stores, non-chain places.

I see little to no compliance with customers or shop keepers in places like that.

I also saw lots of maskless partying and social drinking in November.

> I also saw lots of maskless partying and social drinking in November.

This is the bigger problem.

Welcome to the Thanksgiving bump. People didn't listen and stay home. And, if they got together, they didn't wear masks.

I got Covid from community transmission. I quarantined in my house, away from my wife, and wore a mask 24/7.

She didn't get my Covid.

Masks work, but people have to bloody well use them.

> She didn't get my Covid.

Out of curiosity, did she get tested? What about for antibodies?

Yes, she has been tested for active Covid about a half-dozen times with both the fast (15 min) and slower tests. We wanted to make extremely sure she wasn't an asymptomatic carrier who could give it to her elderly parents.

She didn't get tested for antibodies as the health system has far more important things to deal with right now in the US, unfortunately.

I spent a week in a small apartment with someone who had symptomatic Covid. Close contact the whole time. Neither of us wore masks.

I never got it.

An anecdote means very little, and certainly is not evidence that masks work without controls for every other thing that might have prevented you from getting infected.

> Supermarkets continue to be rammed, but staff aren't required to wear masks.

The wearing of masks by retail employees has been mandatory in England since 24th September [1].

Up here in Manchester I don't recall seeing any supermarket workers not wearing them. I can easily believe that conditions in London are different though.

[1] https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2020/09/face-masks-made...

I'll take some pics next time. As I say, we have a huge enforcement gap here.

I'm also in Manchester, haven't seen anyone without a mask in a shop for a long time.

I think the problem is that people don’t want to enforce it because 1 in 50 people you try this on are likely to go batshit insane almost instantly. No one wants to deal with that.

At the end of the day this whole thing is dependent on the weakest link and there are a lot of weak links in society.

I have been to Gran Canaria recently and good luck trying not wearing a mask in a shop over there :)

I think the general more aggressive Spanish way of communicating helps a lot.

> The attitude here is rapidly becoming "why should I bother if no one else is?". And frankly, I think the government know and encourage this. Its all but policy. Time and again we see them decline scientific advice, then act surprised when infection rates spike.

They always believed in "herd immunity", so they're going to run with the minimum restrictions that achieve an ""acceptable"" death rate.

We still don't have a great picture of what's driving the infections, due to the failure of track&trace. I suspect it's schools, universities, workplaces, and (unfortunately) hospitals, but I don't have handy evidence for that.

Having Folkestone jammed with containers of undistributed PPE while the clock runs down to the Brexit logistics crisis isn't helping either.

Anyway, the Tory public have been inexplicably satisfied with the performance so far, and are probably going to widely ignore the last-minute changes to Christmas rules.

People are operating on instincts that amount to something like 'the choices are the 80-year olds die im five years instead of now, or we all ruin years of our lives and hand over more power to the petty little tyrants who thrive under lockdowns. Sorry, grandma, but you were on your way out, anyway'. Of course, that's not acceptable to say. Hence all the normal people say whatever they have to to get along and do otherwise (as usual) and True Believers are increasingly confused, angry, and disillusioned (as usual).

There's a lot of under 80s who are now experiencing "long covid" semi-disabling symptoms weeks or months after infection. I know a few personally.

Getting the measures right gets rid of covid and lets people get back to normal. Bad measures give the worst of both worlds, prolonging the problem.

'Getting the measures right' would require some mix of unity (which doesn't exist in modern multicultural countries) and/or a strong authoritarian government. If, for some reason, you like not having indigenous racial minorities sent to re-education camps while you're not looking, then those options aren't really available.

If there were a country with the nerve to have no 'measures' at all, they would have herd immunity, a pile of corpses, some long-term health conditions from covid (that we will have, too- everyone's getting this thing), no long-term health conditions from everyone being locked in their homes for a year, no year+ fucking of the economy, less consolidation of wealth into the hands of a few, less of an immediate risk of an increase in authoritarianism via increasing the power of the local government...

For some size of 'a discrepancy in the pile of corpses (from this year)', I would, if I could push a button and switch to the world where people were left to do as they may, push it. A lot of people would, too, it's just too callous and inhuman to admit that yeah, sorry, if you're 85 and going to die in 3 years from the flu anyway your continued life might not be worth the price of greatly inconveniencing a 25-year-old for a year.

I'm in the home counties around London, and I can see something similar. I actually ran into a pair of covid guards from the council, the only time I've seen them, and I kid you not they had their noses over their masks.

The rules stopped being followed some time ago, and I'll tell you why.

We can't believe in the government anymore, and it's because there's been too many cases of one rule for the people, one for the rulers. Multiple government level staff have been caught breaking the rules. Cummings was maybe the most egregious case, a known positive driving hundreds of miles to his parents, who is then protected by the PM from sacking. On top of that, when he actually did get sacked it was due to a petty internal power struggle months later, with no mention of the breach. Then there was the scientist with the affair, the MP who took the train back to Scotland, and so on. Plus stories of cronyism in who was given contracts to service the covid needs.

I can see why people think the rules are a theatre. They obviously don't think the rules matter, or that it matters whether we get the required projects done by competent people.

We elected a talker to waffle his way through the Brexit negotiations. That would have worked, because those treaties are impenetrable to normal people; He can do a bit of clever rhetoric to talk up this or that point, and nobody is any wiser because they won't know what it's like to be a cheese import business with no voice in the media. Now the game is up, because you can't talk your way out of a global pandemic, it's too far from normal politics to have practiced stepping around.

It is so fascinating how some cultures are just ready for different environments on this planet.

Authoritative collectivist monocultures are doing great with this pandemic, and that is practically the only combination that has a grip on things.

Authoritative collectivist monocultures are also better at controlling the media and banned disagreement with the government position. All we hear is they are doing a good job so it must be true.

Monoculture is not necessary. Case(s) in point: Malaysia and Singapore.

Collectivist definitely help.

"Authoritative collectivist monocultures are doing great with this pandemic"

They are great at controlling the flow of information.

"Authoritative collectivist monocultures"...That sounds like you're insulting them three times over :)

You could call them sensible, mature, selfless societies.

Either way one cuts it, the UK is neither.

That requires a lot of assumptions

Authoritative:

I don't consider less-inclusive political systems worse. They have best, average and worse cases, where the problem is that they get worst case many times over. A benevolent dictatorship is capable of getting the best case results, the predictable threat is that their replacement will not be capable of stewarding resources the same way.

Whereas more inclusive political systems get average case results more reliably and it is practically impossible to get a best case result with a lot of energy continually necessary to avoid worst case results.

Collectivist:

I don't consider collectivist to be a pejorative term and don't know of any context where it is. You picked a synonym, selfless.

Monoculture:

Just a fact of life. Where monocultures help them be able to predict what their neighbor does and trust that result, then large-scale immediate coordination without the state is easy. It isn't impossible for a multicultural society to achieve the same benefits, its also not happening. Unlike others that might use this word, I am not making any statement on a preferred living arrangement.

> I don't consider collectivist to be a pejorative term and don't know of any context where it is. You picked a synonym, selfless.

Oh I don't know, socialism scares republican voters shitless, I wouldn't be surprised if collectivism did too.

Okay.

These words are not inherently insults regardless of how allergic other people are to adjectives.

All good though.

when a word is indeed "not inherently [an] insult", but is a de facto one for millions of people, I'm not clear what is gained by pointing out dictionary definitions or alternative reactions to the term.

Its clear that it wasn't an insult because I said so multiple times specifically to clear up any ambiguity. That’s the point.

China is a sensible, mature, selfless society? I’m sure the Uighurs would have opinions that differ. Also let’s not forget Tiananmen Square and what those students would say.

Australia?

And islands. Australia may be a continent, but its low population density and lack of roads connecting it to more populous regions is certainly a contributing factor. All of the countries doing best are either authoritarian or effectively political islands (Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, China).

"Australia" has a low population density because most of it has close to no population; it's easy to be mislead by this if you're not aware of how the population is distributed within a huge area, but the areas where most people live do not have low population density. It's heavily urbanised (more so than the UK), with the vast majority of the population living in reasonably dense metropolitan areas.

It's the willingness and ability to take effective measures, not the geography, that matters.

If geography and population density have nothing to do with it, then I suppose California isn't one of the world epicenters right now.

Australia has a lower population than California, by the way. Obviously, its pop is mostly spread over the east coast, but compared to the UK it's extremely sparse, with no tunnels connecting it to the mainland. It's disingenuous (at best) to think that the island nations that had successful lockdowns were all doing something magically better than other places with significant restrictions to daily life like France, Italy, California, etc. because they couldn't realistically close their borders to ground traffic.

Population density has something to do with it, you're just mistaken about the population density of Australia where people actually live.

And obviously you can close a land border as well, it's just a matter of whether you're willing to do it. Australia also imposed tight restrictions on most of the land borders between states.

My understanding of the situation in new zealand is that at the beginning of the pandemic (back in march) they knew their health systems weren't up to the job - NZ's health system is kind of bad - so they took decisive action to ensure they could keep the pandemic under control. I think they're a bit better now but they still lack confidence in their health system.

Here, nearby in NSW our public health system is really good. We're currently dealing with out third significant outbreak - seems to be an escape from an overseas arrival - but we can justifiably be confident that we are able to stamp these things out without too much disruption (relatively speaking).

Great Britain is an island...

It is probably the most connected not-tiny island.

(One of the world's biggest airports, several of Europe's busiest, frequent direct rail connection to the continent, frequent ferries on many routes, fully integrated free trade + work zone.)

"According to Getlink, the company which operates the Channel Tunnel, 1.64 million trucks traveled between the UK and the EU using the crossing last year. More than 2.5 million cars made the crossing, as did 51,229 buses and 2,012 freight trains.

Added to the even greater volumes of truck crossings made on ferries — the Port of Dover handled a record 2.6 million trucks in 2017, according to its own figures — it accounts for a massive annual volume."

The UK could have closed all these borders down. They just chose not too.

The UK could not close those borders down, we would starve.

... you can still unload freight. You limit the movement of people though.

People love to make excuses or put up obstructions to an idea, but solutions are almost always achievable with a little planning, resources and the will to make it happen.

Not to mention it has double the population of Australia and 80x the population density.

Also New Zealand?

Our (UK) response has been a bit of a clusterfuck so far, we're not a good example to judge by.

Indeed. We could have chosen to be an island, but that would have meant quarantining business travel.

The comedy of errors around the government has probably been worse though.

Barnard Castle alone probably killed thousands, the way this government is doing contracts is probably criminal, we fucked up the T&T for months etc. etc. etc. etc.

A comedy of errors assumes some level of ignorance or carelessness, but we have 10 years (and counting) of empirical evidence that this government is acting out of nothing but self-preservation and malice.

Voting Mr Bean into office would constitute a comedy of errors; but what we have now (when you also throw Brexit into the mix) is far from funny.

It'd also have meant severing food supply chains (and probably also medical supply chains and a bunch of others). The UK relies on trucks coming across from the continent and continuing on to destinations throughout the country with their original drivers. Ending that would make Brexit look like a walk in the park by comparison. Also, you've got to remember that the time period during which the UK would've had to do this for it to be effective was one where the WHO and all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive, xenophobic and made things worse, something Trump would do, and when Italy still incorrectly believed they had zero cases.

Only if you assume the worst implementation without thinking of the necessary exemptions. Obviously don't cut off the food supply chain.

> time period during which the UK would've had to do this for it to be effective

.. lies roughly from Feburary to the present day. No reason to allow travel from countries with significant prevalence.

> all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive, xenophobic and made things worse

[citation needed]

   [citation needed]

How about this: https://www.containcovid-pan.eu/? Choice quote: Given open borders within Europe, a single country alone cannot keep the number of COVID-19 cases low

Let's reverse the burden of evidence, and request [citation needed] for your implicit claim that the open borders lobby is not relevant here?

It wouldn't have been that hard to implement quarantine for truck drivers (cleaning cabs and switching drivers at the crossing, etc). Not trivial. But not that hard either. There would be no need to shut down the supply chains.

> the WHO and all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive,

I'd argue that these were very much the wrong-thinking people. And that the WHO advice has been pretty terrible throughout. It seems obvious to me that closing borders is appropriate in a pandemic. The UK still hasn't done this. Lots of people were going abroad on holiday between lockdowns.

> The UK relies on trucks coming across from the continent and continuing on to destinations throughout the country with their original drivers.

I'm not familiar with freight in Europe, so please excuse the diversion.

They drive freight vehicles onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle or on ferries? I'm guessing this isn't containerized freight, which would seem to make sense to transfer to freight rail (at least to cross the channel).

All of them (there is also plenty of containerized freight on ships).

With the very porous border, there is little lost time through checks -- it was easy to send the driver all the way from Germany to Manchester. I think from leaving the French motorway to driving onto the British one takes about an hour by lorry-on-train.

By ferry, it's little different than going from Germany to Denmark by ferry. They will glance at the passport as well as the ticket.

Boarding the train : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8r0kjJvvIY

(Cars go on a different train, enclosed and you stay in your car.)

> They drive freight vehicles onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle or on ferries?

Both, although more volume goes through the ferries. (tunnel trains is 1.5 million trucks a year or something in that ballpark if I remember correctly)

Now that France has closed the border (first time ever?) we have some numbers:

“To put this into context, there are about 6,000 vehicles we would expect, just under in Dover today, probably I’d say 4,000 would have gone across from Dover, just under 2,000 on the Eurotunnel,” he said.

“But there’s probably something like 32,000 units that would have been the daily total so the vast majority including virtually all the vaccine actually comes via container.”

Containers will mostly be on ships, but some will come on normal freight trains. (Eurotunnel is the lorries-on-trains service.)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/21/france-ban-uk-...

See table 2 in the most recent weekly national COVID-19 surveillance report [1], which breaks down where outbreaks have happened. In London, there were 220 outbreaks last week:

  Educational             108
  Hospital                 42
  Care home                38
  Workplace                20
  Other                    10
  Prisons                   1
  Food outlet/restaurant    1

This is outbreaks, not infections - i don't think we have statistics on that, so this is the best indication we have of where the virus is spreading.

Schools, hospitals, care homes, and workplaces account for the huge majority of spread. There's no empirical reason to think either tube trains or supermarkets are the problem.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-flu-and-co...

One needs to be careful with such statistics though. The Netherlands had similar numbers but luckily also reported they could only trace 20% of the outbreaks. And that puts things in a very different perspective.

Of the traced outbreaks, most were in schools. But that is not really a surprise, as outbreaks in schools are really easy to trace. If you have a group of 25 students which basically spend 40 hours a week together and they all get sick, super obvious. But how do you trace clients of a restaurant back to a restaurant? You mostly don't.

My reading of these lists is as a mix between places that are easy to trace, and places where really a lot of infections are happening. It is hard to tell which are which and which are both. Not to mention where the other missing 80% of cases came from.

Edit, ignore the next paragraph, I was looking at this week vs last wekk...

Weirdly I see slightly different numbers... Table 2 on page number 26 of the first pdf? Sorry if I'm looking in the wrong place...

Either way, I think this relies on contact tracing data, but contact tracing doesn't happen on trains or in supermarkets (super markets are exempt why exactly? No one knows). That's why their zeros...

Both are places where a huge number of people pass, and nearly nobody stays for long. I imagine both would give a very large number of false positives, so you'll need a lot of work to get little impact.

[Replying to my own comment]

Just been to the Tesco at Roneo Corner in Havering (1 borough further out than Barking and Dageham).

38 customers without a mask inside the store (excludes kids even teens, excludes anyone with a pointless visor, excludes anyone with a green and yellow lanyard which means they're exempt).

8 members of staff without a mask (again, excluding as above).

Highlights include:

* a woman in Islamic dress with a head scarf and eye veil, she had covered every inch of her skin EXCEPT for her mouth and nose.

* a staff member with a managers badge and no mask

* a parent who took off his mask and gave it to his baby to play with once he was inside

* an aisle with about 40 people crammed in looking at the discount section with a staff member with no mask holding a "2m social distance" sign and getting in people's way, but not stopping them or asking anyone to move on!?

That's such a contrast to my area (rural Oxfordshire), I haven't seen a maskless customer in a supermarket since the rule came in.

I'm pretty shocked staff in supermarket employees aren't required to wear masks in London.

But this isn't really true: "One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning.

Covid is pretty contagious, but you really need to be around someone for ~15 minutes to have a good chance of infecting them. Superspreading events can occur, but they are fairly rare.

I bet supermarkets aren't big transmission vectors.

Or maybe just five minutes:

> If you just want the results: one person (Case B) infected two other people (case A and C) from a distance away of 6.5 meters (~21 feet) and 4.8m (~15 feet). Case B and case A overlapped for just five minutes at quite a distance away. These people were well beyond the current 6 feet / 2 meter guidelines of CDC and much further than the current 3 feet / one meter distance advocated by the WHO. And they still transmitted the virus.

https://zeynep.substack.com/p/small-data-big-implications

I don't think that the math works like that.

While it might take some time for an infected person in close proximity to push a specific second person across some risk threshold in a 1-on-1 interaction, that's not the scenario we're worried about.

We're worried about how many people an infected person might infect during many, many interactions.

Even if the probability of infection is low in a single 2 minute interaction, some people in service jobs have thousands of interactions a day. (not all one-on-one).

> Covid is pretty contagious, but you really need to be around someone for ~15 minutes to have a good chance of infecting them

...if you are the only one around them who is infectious.

Covid is pretty contagious, but you really need to be around someone for ~15 minutes to have a good chance of infecting them.

Does that mean that someone has to breath in my virus for 15 minutes before there's enough of it inside them to infect them?

Or does it mean that if I'm the infected staff member constantly spewing virus near an ever-changing cast of shoppers, I can expect to infect about 4 people an hour, some of whom were near me for only seconds?

> Does that mean that someone has to breath in my virus for 15 minutes before there's enough of it inside them to infect them?

This one. Kinda. The timing may vary, and it's a risk distribution, so there are tails on the low and high ends.

>I bet supermarkets aren't big transmission vectors.

I think that is probably true, after all we continued to buy groceries right through the lockdown period and cases remained low.

For people not familiar with London train stations: they're huge and can be very busy.

Here's video from one (St Pancras, about 35m people per normal year) today: https://twitter.com/scattermoon/status/1340393706009079812?s...

Most people appear to be wearing masks, but still it's not ideal.

Exactly my experiences in London. Crazy isn't it? I just don't think people even believe it's real. Half the people with a mask on TFL wear them over their chin or with their nose out anyway.

The uk always has this 2 levels of laws: laws that are passed and laws that are enforced. When a new law is passed people watch to see whether its enforced. This law is not enforced, so it goes in the same category as speed limits.

I remember the 2011 riots, courts were run 24h a day, sentences were extreme and people were tired and convicted the same day as the offense. That's very heavy handed. But that shows you the priority here.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-14487636

This was also a bad solution. A high number of false positives.

Sensible legislation never rushed but forward thinking is the only option, not running kangaroo legal system suddenly.

That sounds less like justice and more like fear tactics

Yes, massive over prosecution for people who upset the status quo, clemency for people endangering the public...

Not familiar with the TFL acronym - Google says "Transport for London" (underground train). Is that right?

Yup, sorry. Basically the public transport network. So underground and overground trains and buses (mostly - they also licence the cabs and water taxis as well).

Yes but also any public transport in London, eg. Buses are also ‘TfL’. And a few Thames taxis.

Yah.

Correct

The one that makes me laugh is the people who get on the bus and then put their mask on.

And the people outside the supermarket who grab the dirty spray bottle handled by 500 people already, clean their trolley handle but not their hands, then put the mask on their face handling it, then rub their eye and go shopping.

Humans stupid.

One Londoner I know told me he moved to North Africa to escape the social pressure to wear a mask.

Good for him.

>Supermarkets continue to be rammed, but staff aren't required to wear masks.

I don't think this has been the case since September. Admittedly too late, IMO, but I think it has been the law since then.

I was literally in Dagenham Morrisons 30 minutes, only 2 staff had masks, one was wearing his around his neck.

Dagenham is quite a right-wing area? People with right-wing views seems to have been targeted with anti-mask and anti-lockdown misinformation on social media.

Was in Morrison’s last week, employees without masks chatting each other up

Here in Germany everyone is wearing a mask within the mandated areas.

My German tutor has declined politely to meet me since March. Cost him a fortune. Every other service provider is still open. My barber just texted to say we're still on for Monday.

Except for Berlin.

I had friends living in London come back home to Australia. (2 weeks in mandatory hotel quarantine on entry)

Apparently the enforcement and compliance with the rules is night and day different here. They described London as a place with rules that everyone just ignores.

This is mostly hugely speculative.

Australia is in summer, so it would make more sense to compare it to the UK’s summer, if you insist on comparing two countries with very different population densities (a key factor in the spread of COVID-19).

I'd say that counts against the UK: The UK failed to control this DESPITE lovely weather meaning people don't mind meeting outside and schools being shut anyway. Australia battled this through their winter and won despite the outdoors being basicly shut...

Population densities are not wildly different between the two countries if you realise that most of Australia is effectively unpopulated and the vast majority live in a handful of metropolitan areas.

During Melbourne’s winter, Melbourne was reporting the same number of cases a day as the UK in summer.

[0] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...

[1] https://twitter.com/drericlevi/status/1322822297867018240?s=...

yes I know I posted essentially the same information to two comments, I apologise for the spam

My point was, the comparison was invalid due to the seasons but _the comparison is invalid anyway because the two countries are extremely different_.

> One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning

Is that really so? As I recall the viral load has to cross a minimal threshold before infection develops, and even then the lower the load the milder the illness.

A store employee with his mouth shut whom you pass by in about 3 seconds is a far cry from someone who is singing at you at 10 ft distance for an hour, or eating and chatting for that same hour.

> One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning

That is an enormous over-exaggeration. It's a virus, not a magic spell. Plus, employees are not required to wear masks, but customers are.

> Time and again we see them decline scientific advice

Which scientific advice have they declined? So far as I can see, Boris is entirely under the influence of SAGE and does nothing without "scientific advice".

>employees are not required to wear masks

That's exactly my point.

He ignored calls for a September "circuit breaker", then had to panic in October.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/world/boris-johnson-ignor...

This article lists a host of other times scientists have been ignored then proven right:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-government-boris-johnson-...

I agree with every word 100%. Shops, supermarkets, staff, even an NHS clinic allowed someone to talk to reception without a mask..I have asked managers if they are comfortable with the staggering non compliance. “I’ll lose my job” has been their reply. Not surprising a “new strain” has developed.

> Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to why you're not wearing a mask.

Is it policy for the officers to pull one out and say 'you do now'?

Not that I saw.

Supermarkets do that sometimes at the door and good for them. But at this point, I'm tired of people "forgetting". I think it's time for actual enforcement.

Why are religious gatherings exempt? That seems utterly irrational. Surely now of all times is a time for the government to say to religious people “sorry, but we can’t pretend to respect your fantasies right now”.

I live in London, and I couldn't tell you what it's like on the tube or in shops; interesting to hear. But, probably you're also a software engineer working from home, so if it bothers you, how are you able to tell me?

I assume the large majority of tube users are the non compliant, simply because so few of the compliant have any reason to actually need to use the tube, so your 50% doesn't surprise me at all, certainly not that it's low.

Elections have consequences.

> "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to why you're not wearing a mask.

I haven't worn a mask twice. Once because I forgot it and once because I just forgot to put it on.

If "I don't have one" isn't an acceptable excuse what am I supposed to do: produce one out of thin air? It's not like they give out free ones if you forget. There are so many signs now that they're basically invisible. If I'm fined for not wearing it I'll stop wearing it entirely.

> If "I don't have one" isn't an acceptable excuse what am I supposed to do

How is it that after nearly 10 months of this would you not have a mask?

Do you also think that "sorry officer, I didn't realise that getting completely sloshed and then driving was illegal, what am I supposed to to? Suddenly sober up?"

> If I'm fined for not wearing it I'll stop wearing it entirely.

This makes absolutely no sense.

So you want to be fined daily because you got fined once for not wearing a mask during a pandemic?

And people don't understand why it's spreading so much.

That's like saying

> I was fined for dangerous driving, and because of this I'm now only going to drive on the wrong side of the road.

Offer you one and then fine you. Seriously, don't forget and if you're forgetful then prepare early

I have one in my car, a spare in my backpack, keep one in my jacket pocket, and a cheap disposable in my wallet folded up. That way if I forget, I'll have one.

My city in Australia had a grace period for everyone to get a mask. After that a lot of fines were handed out.

Without fines I doubt we'd have seen compliance anywhere near as high because there are a lot of people who don't want to wear them but do because they fear the fine.

There's also a social tipping point sort of thing that happens, and fines help with that.

When hardly anyone is wearing a mask you feel a bit weird or silly.

When half the people are wearing masks you look at the people who are and aren't and can't help but wonder which side is your in-group.

When fines are enforced, everyone has an "excuse" to wear a mask. Darn fines.

Then, when everyone is wearing a mask you feel naked if you don't have one. Only the seriously anti-social will defect.

"It's not like they give out free ones if you forget."

Why the hell not? Seems like the very first thing they should be doing.

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