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Ireland to Impose 5km Travel Limit in Strict New Covid Lockdown

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday October 25 2020, @10:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the second-wave dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Ireland to impose 5km travel limit in strict new Covid lockdown:

Ireland is to close much of its economy and society in a second Covid-19 lockdown that imposes some of the severest restrictions in Europe.

Non-essential shops will close and people are asked to stay at home, with a 5km (3 mile) travel limit for exercise, to curb surging infection rates, the government announced on Monday evening.

From midnight on Wednesday the country will move to its highest lockdown tier for six weeks. Visits to private homes or gardens will not be permitted and there are to be no gatherings except for tightly controlled weddings and funerals.

A graduated fine system for those who breach the 5km travel limit – with exceptions for work and other purposes deemed essential – will be announced later this week. People who live alone or are parenting alone can pair with one other household as part of a support bubble. Two households can meet outdoors within the travel limit. Public transport will operate at 25% capacity.

Non-essential retail will close along with barbers' shops, beauty salons, gyms, leisure centres and cultural amenities. Pubs, cafes and restaurants will be allowed to serve takeout meals only, a devastating blow to an already weakened hospitality sector.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 26 2020, @04:13PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) on Monday October 26 2020, @04:13PM (#1068940)

    In theory, if masks work, and the number of people wearing them doubles, then the number of new infections should fall.

    Or rephrased, if you look at the infection vs mask graphs of a four week period where mask wearing went from 30% to 30% to 30% and new infections dropped, whereas we also have data where mask wearing went from 30% to 40% to 50% and infection rate ... increased ... that is not looking very good for the effectiveness of mask mandates.

    You can run similar statistical analysis on lockdown. Interesting how where I live the infection rate was lower after lockdown ended despite social distancing graphs based on cell phone data clearing showing a difference of 50% in subscriber mobility. Its almost as if lockdowns don't work.

    I suspect the people in power understand this fully and are in damage control mode telling people if they just suffer enough nonsense now, everything will be better. But a scientist who looks at the graph can tell lockdowns and masks have been no more effective than faith healing at reducing viral infection. Essentially the powers that be are wasting peoples time and effort to make them feel less powerless, despite being quite powerless indeed when one looks at the graphs.

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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday October 26 2020, @05:19PM (2 children)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Monday October 26 2020, @05:19PM (#1068974)

    Point taken. Studies like these obviously demonstrate that mask usage "should" prevent covid spread:

    https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/36/eabd3083 [sciencemag.org]

    There are a lot of confounding factors so it is hard to do a good study of covid "in the wild" as you propose. But I take your point, and similar comments can be made about UK. I couldn't find a good study since July or so (face masks became mandatory in UK since August or so).

    > You can run similar statistical analysis on lockdown

    Well, the original covid lockdown did work - i.e. the first wave did subside. Are you positing some other reason for that success?

    > I suspect the people in power understand this fully and are in damage control mode

    Not really - publishing is fairly easy, it is hard to suppress thousands (tens of thousands?) of epidemiologists who are working on this. You should be able to find a journal reference if there is good data.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 28 2020, @01:22PM (1 child)

      by VLM (445) on Wednesday October 28 2020, @01:22PM (#1069854)

      Studies like these obviously demonstrate that mask usage "should" prevent covid spread

      Also plenty of historical data that wearing masks in operating rooms and similar areas work great at preventing disease spread.

      Yet, looking at recent results in the data, they're just not working at all in the general public.

      Obviously some difference in quality (public health "mask" equals bandana, neurosurgeon's OR mask is heavily govt regulated both in manufacture and use).

      Maybe the virus just isn't bothered by masks for whatever weird reason even if in the lab, abstract tests seem to work.

      Maybe the data is weird / bad / fake. All data is "bad" in the sense of being imperfect, but screwing up this bad would be epic level mistake which seems unlikely.

      Could be application layer, like after 40+ hours of using the same mask the media is saturated and its actually worse than not wearing a mask. Its "engineering plausible" although just a random brainstorm. Certainly logic would dictate that after spitting into something enough, it would become, essentially, spit. Perhaps people need to switch masks more often or wash masks or disinfect them. If this wild hypothesis were true, it would explain why masks work great in operating rooms on doctors faces for less than 10 hours at a time, but have no effect on disease reduction when the general public wears the same mask for a month at a time.

      Could be application layer like excessive exercise makes masks worthless due to high air flow. After all not many mask wearing heart surgeons climb three flights of stairs in the middle of a transplant. Again, wild brainstorming of a hypothesis. But that hypothesis would certainly explain why masks work in operating rooms and fail in the general public. Certainly, in the general public everyone carrys something heavy or climbs stairs once in awhile so if the heavy air flow of doing that made masks worthless at disease prevention, that would explain a lot.

      At any rate, "clearly it doesn't work, so we need to do more of it so everyone is unified and it looks like we're doing something" is the usual political madness so naturally thats what we're implementing.

      You should be able to find a journal reference if there is good data.

      Peer review, publishing delays, grant money, meetings, the usual academic delays. I'm sure in about two years there will be some interesting journal articles about how masks were observably worthless at disease prevention despite working in the lab.

      Well, the original covid lockdown did work - i.e. the first wave did subside. Are you positing some other reason for that success?

      The hypothesis game is fun, but just talking about pure observation, for fun we'll assume first derivative of social distancing would affect first derivative of total infected people aka new case numbers. Also we'll assume covid19.healthdata.org is not fake data. We'll assume the news stories about the incubation time being two weeks are also true.

      Lets look at Illinois:

      March 8 social mobility 0% baseline standard estimated daily new infections 900

      March 22 social mobility in this interval dropped from 0% baseline to 51% lower. Estimated daily infection count 8705 which is So first derivative of social distancing is 51 and case load change is 7800

      May 13 lockdown seemed to begin to end around now in the data. Social mobility -44%, new daily infections 10012.

      May 27 two weeks social mobility score now -36%, so a first derivative of 8 percent less social distancing should result in many more cases. Actual new daily infections reported 7259 which is a drop of 2753 not an increase.

      So two datapoints, (social distancing, change in daily infection rate) are (+51, +7800) and (-8, -2753)

      This can be repeated over many locations and over a long period of time. Then combine into best fit.

      The best fit of a pitiful two datapoints is (change in infection rate two weeks later) = 178 * (percent increase in social distancing) - 1322

      Now the y-intercept is "small" compared to case totals and may as well be ignored. But we were promised that killing the economy would save us from infection, yet it seems that every percent decrease in social mobility in Illinois actually increased the number of cases by 178 two weeks later. Huh. Big brother said that number would be negative for sure, and thats how we'd save everyone from infection. Of course the TV and our political leaders would NEVER lie to us, would they?

      There are other oddities. There's a long flat period in Illinois from July and August where nothing changed in disease spread yet mask use varied by ten percent. The mask average is only about half. So we can predict that if 10% change in mask use is invisible in disease spread graphs, why not estimate 0% or 100% mask use would also be invisible in the disease spread graphs?

      Daily infections since the start of the school year have tripled. Yet mask use is 100% mandatory in my kids schools (admittedly not the hellhole of Illinois, but...) and mask wearing among the general public increased 4% over the same time interval. So increasing mask wearing 4% resulted in a tripling of infection rate. Interesting.