COVID-19

The 'plague' train to Leeds left St Pancras at 20-02 this evening. The train is jam-packed with no social distancing possible. A message over the tannoy advised any passengers who felt unsafe to disembark. The train will terminate at Derby for Leeds passengers to catch a connection to Leeds. This does not bode well for the transmission of the disease. People just aren't taking it seriously, until their loved ones start to perish. This is not doom and gloom, it's reality.

 

The London bias was complete nonsense anyway. The fact of the matter was always that you had to treat London as a distinct unit. There isn’t anywhere else in the country where you can get between so many local authorities in so little time. You put one of them in tier 2, everyone piles in there, obviously.

Cherrypicking individual bits of London and giving an infection rate for, say, Havering, is like picking individual council wards of Bradford and saying based on that there’s no way it should be relaxed.

 

Surely the damage has been done already with this one, and it’s a bit of a red herring. If it’s an infectious as it sounds, and they’ve known about it for a week then it’ll be everywhere. It’s an excuse to hide from the fact that they should have seen this coming a mile off rather than skewer everyone’s plans within six days of Christmas.

Walking around Paddington station last night it was rammed with people with suitcases and I can’t imagine it will have been any better today either.

 

I think a lot of the south/London bias comes from the first lockdown when the rates were high down there and not so much up here but the whole country was locked down. Then when it was other way local restrictions were introduced

 

I think if you’d turn back time and do it again then you’d probably have kept the north open a little longer. But by this stage people were paralysed by what they were seeing on the news each day in the likes of Italy and locking themselves down.

The other problem with London is that a huge proportion of people who live in London aren’t from there. If rates are high in London and you incentivise people leaving London then you risk creating what’s happening right now, with packed trains potentially full of the virus.

I think, given where we’re at right now with a vaccine on the horizon, there probably is an argument again to go back to national lockdown and begin to unlock once the vulnerable become protected.

 

Ridiculous 'leadership' from Clown Johnson and his band of incompetents.
Scientists have been saying for weeks that the Christmas relaxation was madness. But Indecisive Johnson waits until a few days before Christmas to do the U turn he previously refused.
Half the country now has a fridge full of food they can't eat and the other half has nothing in for Christmas because they expected to go to relatives for Christmas. So, to add to the 'plague trains' leaving London today, the supermarkets will now be rammed with people doing shopping for food they never expected to need.
If you wanted an object lesson in how to totally bollocks it up, look no further.

 

I mean seriously what a muppet this Johnson is.

Can we get this wa*ker out before he ruins this country?

 

In retrospect they should never have tried to relax the rules over Christmas. As someone who wants more freedom rather than less that goes against what I would usually feel though.

Those trains coming out of London are ridiculous. There is an element of personal responsibility though. What are those people thinking going back to their families like that??

 

He already has with his "Let's Get Brexit Done" mantra.

 

Yesterday’s announcement doesn’t affect me that much, I had no great plans anyway. But I do feel for those who have been told to cancel everything, after been told just a few weeks ago that they could see family. Thing is, the Government have been told about what will/could happen ever since, and just brushed it away as recently as last week. Utter shambles.

I know people will say things about fluid situation, unprecedented etc..But I think what people actually want is clarity and leadership, they understand things can change, but they’ve no excuse this time, they had the advice and ignored it. The scruffy get can’t even be arsed to comb his hair, he’s an embarrassment.

 

Not like this handsome chap eh.. ?

 

The old, iT cOuld bE WorSe bollocks again, eh ? Predictable as much it is tedious.

 

Are they certain it works on the "New Strain"
Wouldn't put money on it to be honest

 

If it changes the antigens that the vaccine currently recognises then it won't work anymore.

 

On the personal responsibility bit, I get what you’re saying, completely. But on the other hand it’s easy to underestimate the position that they’ve been put in. For many of these people the alternative would have been to spend Christmas alone in a cold flat separated from people they care about. The rug was pulled from under their feet in a very panicked fashion at the very last moment, and moving yesterday evening was the only remaining legal option to them to avoid the pretty grim alternative.

You can say that’s selfish, and I understand that, but you’re asking those people to make a much larger sacrifice than those who have the capacity to have a normal Christmas anyway who were only planning on combining households.

I’m lucky in that I’d already planned a Christmas with the two of us at home, so it hasn’t really changed anything. But it’s easy from that position to ‘let them eat cake’ when really this is purely a completely avoidable consequence of the government’s actions.

 

I'm not sure you can assume or guess what situation people would be left in.

Regardless of the decisions made by government - and with regards to Christmas I believe they've made a poor one - people still have their own responsibility to do the right thing. The people jumping on packed trains to travel from and area of high infection and transmission to areas where that is low were doing the wrong thing. Governments making poor choices doesn't excuse that.

It looks like it's an issue all over Europe at the moment - everywhere is locking back down again annoyingly. I'm not going to bash any government too much for trying to give more freedom over Christmas or in general but their timing and communication on that has been very poor.

 

I can make assumptions of the people getting on trains yesterday. The kind of people who get trains north out of London for Christmas are young people working in London with families in the north.

I know how professional northerners working in London live because I’ve done it, and unless you’re minted, you’re living in pretty crappy accommodation for it to be in any way affordable - often with people you don’t really know. There’s no other way of doing it. These people aren’t coming from normal comfortable households who would otherwise be having a smaller but perfectly normal Christmas. As I say, I get it, and if this was the rule all along I would completely agree.

It’s a fundamentally different request to ask those with normal households with a small family to stay at home, and for those who would otherwise have a lonely and miserable Christmas locked in a box room (and plenty will now be doing that). I get people criticising, and I genuinely don’t know what I’d have done, but I have sympathy with these people and it’s not as simple as a pure lack of responsibility.