I’m still amazed by the number of people who are prepared to go out and behave like nothing is wrong now that lockdown rules have been eased.
These people are simply too thick to realise that the virus is still out there. I was looking for a simulation of the situation we’re in and came across this little tool. It’s COVID-19 simulator – not a fancy or professional tool, but a basic example of the exact situation we are in right now.
Basically, the red dot is someone with the virus. The blue dots are uninfected people. When you click the ‘play’ button, the dots start moving randomly, and each time one of the blue dots touches the red dot, that one also turns red. Watch how quickly the whole population becomes infected. Forget the green ‘recovered’ people later, because right now no one know if or for how long those people remain immune, or if they can still transmit the virus (which they can if they are contaminated, even if they’re not infected).
That is what anyone who is desperate to start teaching again (or queue for 5 hours outside IKEA) is both exposing themselves to, and then exposing the rest of us to.
Obviously, if none of the blue dots ever come into contact with the red dot, then there is no spread.
Just consider that in the real world that is the UK right now, there were another 1,570 confirmed cases today – red dots – some of whom will likely have been on beaches and pushing past people in supermarkets at the weekend. The UK has stopped publishing the number of active cases, but it is likely to be somewhere close to 250,000. That’s a quarter of a million red dots, and many of those will also have been in contact with at least some blue dots before they came down with it. And with every man and his dog claiming that they’ve also had it in order to go back to work, how many blue dots will they have been in contact with?
Quite simply, until the number of red dots is so small that your chances of coming into contact with one is unlikely – or until there’s a vaccine – going back to work is fraught with danger.