Itsallaguess wrote:Lootman wrote:
I'd settle for guidelines that are clear. Right now we are allowed to travel to "amber" countries but then the government is suggesting that we shouldn't do that. Surely it is either deemed (mostly) safe or it is not? And yet we are receiving mixed signals.
I am choosing to regard the situation as merely an "advisory" i.e. you go at your own risk and maybe not all provisions of your travel insurance will hold up. But I really don't know.
Taking a trip to amberland next week and confused.
I do agree that the current guidance on some of the available travel options are unclear, confused and unhelpful at the moment, and it's disappointing that they're not more sensibly aligned.
My post earlier wasn't for one minute trying to suggest that everything is, and has been, fine with the situation that we're in and the good and bad steps we've made to get where we are today - I was simply trying to convey the difficulty in trying to gather a good, sensible, working consensus from all of the conflicting information that they must be having to deal with at any given time on the medical, scientific, political, and social aspects that often seem to come into conflict with each other much of the time over this issue, and especially now, at a time when quite diametric pressures on many of those fronts are coming to the fore...
Cheers,
Itsallaguess
I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at what fellow Lemonfoolers were saying a year ago - the earliest I could find were in the "No Statistics" topic. A couple of people were saying "why can't we just get it over with quickly" but a lot more people were explaining why that wouldn't work and also saying "we need to delay infections as quickly as possible, because the earlier we act, the more lives will be saved".
Obviously, there's a huge difference between someone thinking drastic action needs to be taken, and being the person authorising the entire country to close down, but even back last March (so without hindsight) the course of action proposed by many reasonably intelligent non-epidemiologists on these boards would have put the UK in a far better place than what we've had over the past 14 months.
I still think the logical course is to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst - which in practical terms means being overly cautious when a new threat emerges until you know exactly what level of risk you're facing. A true "data not dates" approach would have avoided the government problem being seen in terms of "will they break their 21st June promise?" and would have freed up the government to make the rational best decisions.
The new problem that the government does now have is that for the first time, there is now a potential trade-off between health and economy (assuming the Indian variant isn't 50% more transmissible) because we can avoid another lockdown (which was never an option before).