love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ea8er07XQAAOk51?format=jpg&name=900x900

so not happening

Well that sounds like fun

Brexit vote was 4 years ago today.

I like how they've illustrated that with a picture of a legendarily cramped and tiny pub.

it's also possibly the only pub in Britain that doesn't actually serve pints

Imagine beer garden patrol will be a really fun job

Bar Staff will clean bar tops, door handles and fruit machines at least every twenty minutes and there will be regular patrols of pub gardens to make sure inebriated guests continue to observe social-distancing rules. Children’s play areas are likely to remain out of action.

*Restaurants*

Owners will be required to place strict limits on the number of people they allow in to ensure social distancing is observed, with queues forming outside. They will be encouraged to use reservations to stagger bookings.

Upon arrival, tables, spaced widely apart, will appear surprisingly bare, as napkins and cutlery will only be brought out with food. Laminated menus will be replaced with single-use, disposable menus and condiments will be served in sachets on request.

Waiters may also make use of menu boards but there will be fewer options than usual as chefs will try to minimise cross-contamination of ingredients. Plates will be cleared by staff wearing gloves, or at the very least, waiters will be asked to wash their hands each time they serve a different table.

Payment with contactless card will be encouraged.

Does this come with any guidance about how many family members we're allowed to see at once yet? Or whether people in relationships can see their partners outside of a support bubble?

My guess is we'll know whether or not this has fucked up by the second half of July. If the weather stays like this for a while I'm happy to wait.

Family shmamily, the important thing is opening up Wetherspoon and getting cancer patients back to work

You can presumably see family members down the pub or at the National Gallery.

It's a free-for-all now. Even if there are technically rules in place, they're now completely impossible to enforce.

Will the restaurants and pubs who can't serve enough ever make enough to stay afloat?

I suspect there are going to be more taxpayer backed loans at the very least.

The margins on restaurants are often so tight, i can't see how they're going to survive even a 20% capacity reduction.

Thinking about cinemas, even with distancing reduced to one metre, that presumably means they have to operate with, what, one seat in nine filled?

Depends how long they'll have to keep the distancing in effect, if we're talking for another year then there's no way my local is going to be able to survive.

They've [my local] talked about utilising the bowling green area for more tables but I know for a fact they rely on the really busy nights to stay in business. The amount of people they can serve on a whole bowling green + people inside spead about isn't even close to how many people cram in the pub at the weekend.

https://www.businessinsider.com/brexit-will-cost-uk-more-than-total-payments-to-eu-2020-1?IR=T

Releasing confusing rules + little detail on the financials = the entire approach of this government in a nutshell. It will just wreck people's confidence

I think the only breeding ground for covid than the pub is possibly the covid ward in a crowded hospital.
- everyone shouts
- you can't wear masks
- men are disgusting savages
- everyone touches everything
- key feature of boozing is reducing inhibitions and clouding judgement

Only breeding ground *worse*

it's gonna be lit

ah sat at the bar reading the goal Rona proximity alerts as they come in!

I think that packed public transport and offices are probably worse tbh but yeah if this fucks up it's going to be bad.

At the same time we have been predicting an imminent rise in infection rates since VE Day now and it doesn't seem to have happened, even in cities with thousands of people out in the street protesting and being kettled. But indoor socialising is an entirely different thing.

Feels like a gamble that community transmission is low enough to be vaguely sort-of safe enough (ie with most cases happening in hospitals or care homes). Even socially distanced pubs aren't going to be a fraction of what we had back in March with thousands of people going to sporting events, piling onto trains and into bars etc.

Also given what's been said about booze clouding judgement, there's almost inevitably going to be a lot of people hugging strangers, not to mention the fact that there are a lot of people out there who haven't had even the chance to get laid in three months. Chuck the hot weather in there as well and, yeah.

it's gonna be super lit

Never mind strangers, I'd not trust myself not to hug friends - particularly the ones that have been suffering most from the lack of physical contant.

That's slightly less of an issue from and test and trace point of view though.

NHS has brought forward their planning to deal with the second wave in August/Sept rather than Oct/Nov as originally planned. That, combined with possible immunity being much lower than expected, raises the prospect of a 3rd, 4th or even 5th wave before we get a vaccine

— Pukkah Punjabi (@PukkahPunjabi) June 23, 2020

we should start a pool on what the final uk death toll on this is gonna be

i'm saying 600,000

"final"

well, yeah

i thought about starting a thread for playlist suggestions for music to play on the day when lockdown lifts and we can finally go back to normal, drive wherever, hug anyone, go to pubs - and then i realised it won't work like that, it will just be this slow, staggered, grinding, forward and back and low-level dread. there won't be a 'victory over coronavirus' day.

I mean there might yet be a vaccine or the discovery of reliable drugs, the latter of which could happen soon. TBH I think it's more likely to be a long played-out version of the slow drift back to feeling normal you get after a terrorist attack or series of them. But that normality is often illusory, terrorist attacks also result to permanent changes to physical and social infrastructure and there are probably things we should just get used to here as well, in Italy you already have to have your temperature taken before stepping into a bar or restaurant and we'll have those equivalents.

If the second peak is anywhere near as large as the first then it will have been as a result of a calamitous policy bungle but, at risk of hammering this point home too much, we were all doing a lot of things in the run-up to the first peak that we won't be doing any time soon.

Also unless some changes are made to social security policy very quickly then there will be deaths from the economic disaster as well, possibly a lot of them.

slow, staggered, grinding, forward and back

oh i'll be doing this alright

The whole country's gonna look like an R Kelly video.

Specifically the one where that girl gets pissed on

it's the remix to viral transmission

guys

many xps fuck, the last time I hugged someone was an involuntary one at a gig in March when some coked up bloke started talking to me outside, asked me where my missus was, I went "er...", he said "come on mate, what's she done", I said "well, she died". so he hugged me. was too polite to refuse, despite even then thinking it was a bad idea, this was pre-lockdown but it was in the air already

Specifically the one where that girl gets pissed on

*frantically googles*

please don’t google that

we should start a pool on what the final uk death toll on this is gonna be

i'm saying 600,000

― scampo, foggy and clegg (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, 23 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

More ppl will wfh, avoid public transport, take less holidays and generally become more economically inactive so each wave will kill less.

They may not have any work though.

More to the point we will never know less about covid-19 than we did back in January-March this year. The means to lower the death rate are already there, if not by enough yet.

I'm going for an optimistic 200k excess deaths by the end of winter 2021.

I think it's v much a case of using those masks and hand gels and hoping for the best.

But still a 2nd wave will surely make people think twice about booking a holiday anywhere, or even a day out shopping, or eating out etc.

People kept packing out the pubs until the last possible minute so I wouldn't be so sure of that.

People know about the risks a lot more, as you say. I think enough will not carry on as if nothing has happened over the last three months to mean a very long recession, at the least.

I can’t wait to get back to the pub...and I don’t even drink.

Good news for business today and glad we’ll all have a chance to enjoy the summer safely. #4thofJuly pic.twitter.com/6igrPpBu96

— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) June 23, 2020

very cool guy, you can see how he has risen up the ladder so fast!

I can't wait for you to all catch the rona... and I didn't even know that beer and pubs contribute £23bn to UK GDP and generate £13bn in tax revenue!

Cunt's probably never even been in a pub.

Can't wait for his star to come crashing down.

The man never drunk a carling in his life