Rumour is that the Liverpool area will be the only area to face level 3 lockdown. But the political leaders in the area are saying they have not agreed to that because the government is not offering enough cash.
But the rates are different in different areas. My local area is below 200. However the Waterloo area is around 1000 at the moment (that is about 2 months from herd immunity).
But this is a negotiation? What it says to me is that we are entering the restriction fatigue period. This is the time when people start to choose to take chances, to ignore the restrictions. It was always coming, it was predicted. This is the crucial period.
I remember my first work flight. Somehow I ended up with an ex-RAF person on one side and an ex-Navy person on the other side. Before we took off they had gone through about 6 air disasters they had personally been involved with. My knuckles were white. I have always been uneasy flying. I know the facts, I know the risk of getting killed is low. One of my jobs was reviewing all fatal air crashes in the world, looking at how hard they hit the ground and how many people died. I got to see the Lockerbie Pan Am 747 (they reconstructed it from the pieces). The fear of flying was way higher than the risk of flying demanded. Over time my fear level reduced – to the point that I am now normally asleep before the aircraft leaves the ground.
We know that we are really poor at judging probabilities – the national lottery shows us that, as do all the casinos and online gambling sites.
Even at the current levels if you enter a COVID secure venue for an hour it carried the same risk of death as driving for a year. The risk is low. To start with our fear level was high, but we are getting used to it. Our COVID knuckles are no longer white. We wonder why we are going through the pain of restrictions. We feel happy negotiating about restrictions and economic effects.
Fascinating negotiating idea – we will continue to let people die unless we get more money. The levels in the Liverpool area are averaging out at 600 cases per week per 100,000. The rise is progressing in a fairly consistent manner. At the current rate the Liverpool area will achieve herd immunity before Christmas.
It also means somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 deaths in the Liverpool area alone.
This is the problem with a pandemic – the risk we face from the virus in a month will be much higher than the risk we face today, but it depends on the actions we take today. And to add a complication – the risk we will face next year from societal damage also depends on our actions today.
The level of science behind the actions we need to take is enormous. Sadly there are so many people in the political world that seem to think they can gauge all this in their heads without the backup of 50 teams of experts.