Judging by the amount of people on the Central line around Notting Hill Gate to Shepherd's Bush yesterday, any future mandatory face mask diktat will be largely ignored anyway

About as likely as refusal to treat smokers, drinkers and the obese etc.

Wu - any chance of the NHS putting all the COVID patients who haven’t had any jabs into the car park and letting them sort themselves out?

As someone who has been working from home(s) since March 13th 2020, I would love to get back to working at the office. There is a big difference between working from home three days each week and having someone to talk to in the evenings and working from home five days each week when living alone in a new town sixty miles from friends and family.

I’m wearing a face mask in shops etc. Don’t wear it in restaurants as off for most of the time anyway as eating/drinking. Having my booster jab and my flu vaccine next week.

I’d be surprised if we had another lockdown unless the NHS was at imminent risk of being overwhelmed. The problem is that this winter is going to be very tough, locally we are already full with lots of non COVID stuff while also trying to recover “routine” outpatient services.

I do realise that nothing will persuade you KD, but in any case it isn't me, it is the CDC which is probably far more expert than either you or I.

Trades unions always try it on, Spit. It's their job. Medical ones are no different.

Had 2 jabs will have the booster, what's the panic about Christmas NHS is overrun most winters,not sure why we have to keep restrictions when those in charge have scraped 10k hospital beds in 10 years even though there are far more people living in the UK than 10 years ago

OI- If a trial of 342,000 people in 600 locations can't prove cloth masks are efficacious re Covid infection, I'm not going to be convinced by you TBH.

KD - the summary of surveys as maintained by the CDC [Link] , probably outweighs one survey that doesn't say they don't work, just says they found no proof they do work. It is fine for you to believe whatever suits your purposes but the scientific evidence points strongly to them helping to restrict the spread of viruses.

Lurker- that’s a fair comment- I realise that everyone has their own views on WFH so I was wrong to just say that WFH “is popular”. In fairness I was just extrapolating from the huge difficulty that a couple of companies that I know are having in convincing people to come back into the office. That said, I still think that it will be high on the list as a lever to pull if the government does try to clamp down again.

Wear. My apologies

If a face mask makes you feel safe you should carry on and where one. Most people cba now judging by the flight over here on Tuesday, you had to put one one to get on the plane then most people put them below their nose or chin, or took them off altogether.

saveloy very true, unfortunately the other thing we've learnt is that too many people in this country will just do whatever suits them, from the government down to the fucktards topping their tank up to full with £5 of petrol every day creating queues for something that isn't in short supply.

I’d rather they did something now/soon and actually save Christmas this year, than dither and wait and make me miss Turkey with the family for the second year in a row.

Nick W as someone who has been forced into homeworking now it's not that popular amongst all employees - while our CEO will probably be getting a bonus for cutting costs (whilst working from home in their comfy rural house), we're all paying the energy bills the company used to pay, seeing little daylight and not seeing another person in real life for hours on end. It's like prison except we pay for it as well.

There's also something that twitter feed (very interesting stuff) starts to get near but doesn't go into. UK has a ridiculously high urban density structure compared to several big European countries. For example the same levels as Italy and Spain combined. It can become almost irrelevant whether people are kept at home or at work, the volumes of people they come into contact with, even if contact means shared areas not actual presence, are still high enough to spread illness. It can't be coincidence that heavily urbanised areas fare the worst. Less fresh air, less space between people, more shared environments.

Spit maybe you should reskill into the oldest profession of all time

Home working will fuck my trade once again.been nice seeing customers comeback last 7 weeks even if they only do office 1/2/3 days a week at the office.

'We found clear evidence that surgical masks are effective in reducing symptomatic seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2; while cloth masks clearly reduce symptoms, we cannot reject that they have zero or only a small impact on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections' [Link]

We'll go back to useful cloth or other face masks, proved effective by a significant number of scientific studies.

There was a good Twitter thread on the latest COVID figures (versus other countries) here: [Link]

If more people had worn proper masks properly before we wouldn't have the need to be going back to more restrictions now.

I agree that the most likely new restrictions over the winter are facemasks (which I think work mainly because they are annoying and so deter people from going to places where they are required and hence reduce contacts) and a requirement to work from home where you can (which is pretty popular with employees, so not controversial) - I can’t see things going much beyond that, but of course who knows with this disease