I'm more optimistic about the situation in Scotland for two reasons. Firstly Devi Sridhar doesn't seem to be enjoying the same level of access to the Scottish Government as was the case in spring and summer last year. Secondly, there's an election coming up, and politically it's far better to be able to say "because of the sacrifices we so prudently forced you to make last year, we are now able to unwind the restrictions in Scotland 48 hours or so earlier than in England"
Agreed - I think that the election is a key point to remember when considering Sturgeon's strategy. She's played politics a lot already in this so I would not be at all surprised if she actually released restrictions earlier just to be different and make herself look better than England.
This is a really good comparison and shows how far we have come - people are talking about leaving pubs closed until May or even longer. That would be more severe than the original lockdown.
As i've noted before, one barrier could be related to this point. If we get to September with some restrictions still present there will be strong calls to leave them in place as winter will only be just around the corner. For this reason, I believe if all restrictons have not gone by mid August, we have them until 2022.
You seem to forget the millions of vaccines we're administering, now over 10% of the adult population, isn't this the land we were promised where all restrictions were removed?
A tad pessimistic no? Even if out idiotic government did ban it, if every other country in the world opens up how long do you think such a ban would last here?
I suspect we won't be totally restriction free until the latter half of the year, no. If the current trajectory is that all adults won't have been offered a vaccine until September, I can't see COVID restrictions totally disappearing before then. However, I'm willing to suffer mask-wearing / token efforts at social distancing if we can actually get back to doing things. Things were not that bad in July / August last year, when it seemed like we might have seen the back of all of this.
There would also be major resentment by super rich private jet owners if they couldn't fly anywhere, or in particular if they were and the rest of the population wasn't then there'd be very serious trouble.
If we manage to vaccinate our population much more quickly than everywhere else, I suspect the problem will end up being other countries still being locked down, rather than us.
I can't see what justification there would be for doing so if the entire population has been vaccinated.
Absolutely media love a bad news story and they flogged it not even any credence to cases and admissions falling but tomorrows a new day.
Do you mean "possibly hit"? How he leaves office is a big question mark as there are two factions who want him out for different reasons: if he goes because too many have died and the overall handling has been shambolic in the "everything done late/half hearted" sense, he'll probably resign on his own accord once the vaccine rollout allows most if not all restrictions to be lifted. If however he doesn't lift them quick enough for the CRG's liking and the fallout from all this becomes very apparent while Johnson is still in charge, his departure will more likely be through "resign or we'll kick you out" from his own party.
Hopefully now that grim milestone has passed we'll get a bit less focus on deaths for a couple of weeks
An interesting point on the note of dropping case numbers - a lot of people were claiming the drop in case numbers was a temporary lag due to fewer people getting tested as a result of snow etc.
I do wonder if increasing immunity in the population is now coming into play too: we know from the ONS that around 10% of the population had antibodies at that time, and that's not included all those getting infected between Christmas and the early January infection peak, plus now all the vaccinations are coming into effect, where 2.4 million first does were administered by the 10th January, which should now be taking effect; in the first week of February the effects of 4 million doses cumulative take hold plus any further immunity gained from infections past the peak. Each parameter here won't offer much immunity, but it all adds up to reducing infection rate potential.
I think you are a bit opptimistic there!
Although it's not really any massively new information. The 'sources' talk about cases and deaths needing to come down and the vaccine rollout going as planned.
