Not trying to be ‘edgy’ or Devil’s advocate here but you can’t really blame people for their non-compliance on account of reading about so many leading figures in the media and government seemingly holding their own advice in contempt by openly ognoring the lockdown rules to suit their own needs. I’ve been inducted onto three building sites during the lockdown where the developers went as far out of their way as possible to emphasise the importance of social distancing, etc., but as soon as we got out on site to work it all went out the window. Even if you raised concerns we were told to like it or lump it.
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I don’t think the difference between the UAE and UK compliance is down to
Do you think the Emir and royal family are following the advice? or that anyone would find out if they were not? I would put the difference between these two countries mainly down to the type of state.
Comparing other liberal democracies with higher compliance and (possibly) a very different attitude to the problem, such as Japan and South Korea, would be more relevant to self-analysis.
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I must have hit the reply option by mistake. It wasn’t meant to be a question for TheWrongTrowsers.
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You may have hit the wrong button, Swagsy but you make a good point.
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Here we are in London going into tier 3 along with most of the south of the country soon according to the news. So I am sitting here watching the Australia/India test match on the telly. I notice the crowds all sitting together enjoying the sport in the sunshine. It looks like fun. Hang on there, no one has a mask on. Why is that I ask myself. I look this up during one of the (numerous) ad breaks. I read that the Aussies achieved this by having a vicious lockdown early on and significantly - it seems - by securing its borders. No doubt they are all going to be having a merry Christmas next week and will be seeing their families as usual. Same in NZ. Another island nation.
Given that we are also an island nation, it seems fairly clear that the UK could have done this and achieved a similar result. Does it not follow therefore that we have completely and utterly buggered this up ? Is there also not a large dollop of irony here given how keen we are to distance ourselves from Europe and go our own way ?
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Yes. Some of us have been campaigning for better, more consistent border control for many, many years - only for others to try to block this whilst verbally abusing us.
The value of border control is really coming to the fore right now.
Ok, but is there any reason why we could not have done this earlier in the year ? - sealed our border, I mean ?
None whatsoever. There simply wasn’t political will
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@anon5422159 Let’s not conflate immigration policy with border control. We had the ability to close our borders. This has not / will not change upon EU exit.
Major outbreak being taken very seriously. 28 cases 
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Can I please ask that you read our forum guidelines before flagging posters. You may not like or disagree with some posts but please don’t flag them if they don’t break forum guidelines.
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“Island nation” is not quite true (there is that land border in Northern Ireland), and I think it is a bit of a distraction that fails to recognise significant differences between the amount of international travel to/from the UK compared with Australia and New Zealand. It’s not really a fair comparison.
In any case, closed borders are only helpful if you have a low number of cases already in the country. The virus was already circulating in the UK before the magnitude of the crisis was clear. The failure in the UK was in not bringing the numbers low enough and then not having a robust tracing system and compliance with isolation requirements to keep them low.
Closing borders also clearly isn’t sufficient… the US closed its borders early on. An extensive travel ban for non-US nationals is still in place 9 months later and yet the virus remains out of control.
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We will never know because it was weeks before the government took it even slightly seriously. I think this tweet about prevention in public health puts it better than I could:
‘Sucess will always look like overreacting and acting early’
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That’s not strictly true. I had thought the US banned entry for arrivals from a handful of countries, mostly European but it’s borders remained open to most of the World and continue to do so. While the land border was effectively shut between the US and Canada to all but non-essential travel, movements were still allowed by air.
Easy to judge with the benefit of hindsight, and when you’re not having to consider the very damaging implications of shutting down the economy.
The problem with just listening to one side in isolation (ie the doctor you quoted) is that the doctor isn’t having to consider the same horrendous trade-offs that the government is. So she’ll always err on the side of medical caution regardless of the consequences for society.
For the same reason, we shouldn’t listen in isolation to the owner of a hotel chain, for example.
I don’t deny that at all- it was a horrific decision to have to make with pitfalls on every side. But it certainly was possible to quash the spread if you were willing to accept the economic consequences- NZ and Australia have managed it.
Who made the right choices economically will not be known for a long time, but in terms of reducing the number of deaths clearly they made the right call.
Yes and no. Aus is currently panicking as they thought their draconian measures had eliminated the virus, but it turns out they haven’t:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/18/australia-imposes-border-curbs-as-covid-cluster-in-sydney-grows.html
And now the virus is spreading amongst a population that’s had no chance to build herd immunity like we did.
The cluster is 28 cases. They can almost certainly quash it- really illustrates the importance of an effective track and trace strategy too.
Plus they don’t need to hold out much longer- once they have secured vaccine supplies they can end this very quickly.
Trying to acquire herd immunity ‘in the wild’ is looking a terrible idea- as Sweden have unfortunately discovered…
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I don’t think acquiring herd immunity was ever the policy of HMG in any event was it ? Not that they admitted to anyway.
I think we are going into Tier 4!
So it would seem. Well thats xmas out the window then. Jeez.