I thought the legislation for public transport was required to be reviewed within 6 months?
.
The legislation requires continuous review and the Health Secretary is obliged to remove the restrictions as soon as they are no longer proportionate. The 6-month review they provided for is in addition to the ongoing requirement. Despite requests, no information about any such reviews has been published. Parliament (and in particular the Opposition) isn't holding him to account (as it should) and the courts remain reluctant to intervene on matters of proportionality - see Simon Dolan's appeal hearing at the end of September.
Anyone see a link with the the end of the Brexit transition period? If we end up with food, medicine and fuel shortages in January, it's very convenient for the Govt to be able to say it's illegal to gather in large numbers, to stage protest marches etc., but I guess those will happen anyway.
If you're looking for a Brexit conspiracy theory, the Dominic Cummings driving affair revealed the level of passion that remains lurking below the surface amongst those who oppose Brexit and are still hoping to derail it before the year is out. Perhaps some in the civil service and in the media have discovered Boris's Achilles' Heel and are conspiring to lead him up the garden path in his response to this crisis, trying to prise his natural supporters away from him and hoping to fatally wound his administration and salvage a closer EU relationship from it.
Regarding the poll on this thread, there's no point voting as I think the numbers are meaningless as people already discussed. Even if the virus disappears completely, testing on the current scale will still provide a lot of positive results - and the government is still talking about scaling it up by another factor of ten! If you've no symptoms and you take one of the tests and it comes back positive there's a body of opinion that reckons you've only now a 1 in 3 chance of actually having the disease - and that could easily be an over-estimate. Actual false positive rates don't appear to be known (published) but it's felt both that tests can still return positive for some time if you had the virus but already recovered (and have no live virus left) and that scaling the testing up rapidly leads to lax procedures that reduce the accuracy further. (Tests can also occasionally be positive due to material that isn't actually from this particular virus.) A testing protocol on this scale would normally require a second test independent of the first to be performed to eliminate most false positives caused by random effects before a case was counted. But statistical subtleties seem to be lost in the race to get headlines and justify past decisions.
Just to make that clearer, it's being suggested that the daily 'case' count being published may already include more people who don't have the live virus than people who do. That leads people to look at hospitalisations instead - but those numbers have their own (different) problems (namely not reporting severity of relevant and other symptoms - is this someone with low oxygen levels due to the virus or someone who had an accident and happened also to test positive). In reality you shouldn't take any one set of numbers at face value, but rather look at the totality of all the data, taking into account everything estimated about all the shortcomings, weighting it all accordingly, and then try to reconstruct possible models consistent with those weighted observations. One of the most powerful observations came early on (pre-lockdown), where it was noticed that in a significant number of households only one person showed symptoms (but in others everyone did), which suggested a sufficient level of immunity was already present in some individuals.
