If you assume that officers are following proper protocols (masks, gloves, proper hygiene) .. then I would say that it makes sense to not quarantine everyone that the officers come in contact with.

If you assume that everybody follows the proper distancing and wears a mask, we'd have already solved this pandemic 6 months ago.

Assuming people will follow proper protocols, whether they are police officers or not, is not a good plan.

What is the most common way of transmision? I assume not random policemen but relatives and friends. Try doing distancing there.

The problem is that policemen are well-connected nodes in the transmission graph. Those on fieldwork will meet a lot more random people any given day than you or I will on a shopping run.

I don’t remember anyone saying the pandemic would be solved in a few months if everyone followed proper protocols. It was about flattening the curve, which in fact should increase the length of the pandemic.

China, Taiwan, and a number of other states (many in east / southeast Asia) have effectively contained the virus. China did so in 6--8 weeks.

Western countries notably have not.

Well, maybe Western countries should have talked about containing the virus, not flattening the curve.

Indeed it was a massive messaging error. For maybe 20% more short term work we’d be in a new zealand/east asia situation. Summer was the time to do it.

Now we just have hard choices.

At this point, I think it's pretty clear that New Zealand's approach couldn't be expected to lead to New Zealand-style results in places that aren't relatively small islands a thousand miles or so by sea from the nearest neighbour. There are just too many infections that slip through the net even after banning most people from travelling there and requiring returnees to quarantine in state-run facilities at their own expense for two weeks - it works for them, but the same level of per-capita leakage in a country with even ten times the population would cause such a stream of imported cases spreading Covid in the community that I don't think it'd ever be able to drop below level three restrictions, let alone beome Covid-free.

In reality the UK probably wouldn't even be able to manage that - for example, we have a constant stream of lorry drivers coming in from locations throughout Europe to destinations throughout the UK, many of them with absolutely vital goods, and that's a great way to spread Covid from country to country. Somewhere like the US would stand even less chance.

I’m originally from eastern canada. They have completely eliminated local transmission. And they have truck drivers bringing in goods, including from the US.

Haven’t heard of it as a source of transmission. Truck drivers generally don’t get off their shift and then go sing karaoke.

And I live now in Quebec, which got local transmission down to almost nothing. But then they opened bars for three months. I think if they had kept them closed a month longer and told the pop “get to zero and we can have a normal winter” we could have done it. Now we’re surging again.

There was no messaging error. Everyone was talking about flattening the curve, no one was talking about preventing cases. I wonder where this gaslighting comes from. It seems like we don't even need 1984 agencies to rewrite history, people do it themselves in their heads to keep up with the current agenda...

What I mean is a lot of people, like me, said flatten the curve, but would have wanted to eliminate it if it seemed reasonably possible. So I and other people who said the same thing now feel we made an error.

Flatten the curve started as a Twitter meme and only then spread to governments. I don’t think govts wanted to eliminate, but my point is I wish those who were in the forefront had sent a different message. I was looking at this from mid feb, before western governments were generally sending any message at all.

Surely they are two absolutely different things with different goals. Nobody was talking about reducing the total number of cases, where did you get this idea from?

Just look at any article when the idea of “flattening the curve” entered the news, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.ht...

Drew Harris, a population health analyst at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia that is cited in this NYTimes article, has said:

>Important to remember that #Covid-19 epidemic control measures may only delay cases, not prevent.

and

>Without a vaccine, eventually everyone is likely to be exposed to the virus. Some won't get sick, some will have mild illness, some severe, and a few will die. The goal is to put this off for as long as possible so we have time to prepare and spread out the surge of cases.

In 2020 hindsight, much could have been done better.

It's reasonable to assume that Police has procedures that are followed, or at least that are followed infinitely better than the general public. And this has also to be balanced with the fact that the Police requires a high level of security (not a good idea for them to be tracked by a third party app).

It's much more important, because much more significant both in term of raw numbers and in term of risk of non compliance, to ensure that the general public follows the same: I was at the supermarket yesterday and the app told me that no less than 5 positive people were inside... with no consequences.

> It's reasonable to assume that Police has procedures that are followed, or at least that are followed infinitely better than the general public

This is not supported by evidence. In other words, the world doesn't function the way we wish it would.

> This is not supported by evidence.

What's your evidence? Because police do have procedures that are internally enforced whereas the general public does not and is not exactly keen on rules (as we've seen)

Sounds like some people are criticising for the sake of it because this is the Police...

Evidence like this: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/face-mas...

I'm not sure comparisons between Oregon Troopers and UK police are especially useful.

(Not saying uk police are perfect but something like the this in the linked article would be less likely here)

Because the premise I was responding to was "It's reasonable to assume that Police has procedures that are followed, or at least that are followed infinitely better than the general public."

I didn't take that as meaning a specific police force, but rather, police in general. I was specifically responding to mytaylorrsrich's comment that people are reacting negatively to the police just because they are police, whereas my point was that they were believing that the police always held themselves to a higher standard just because they were police. I'm not convinced that is the case, and this link is a point of evidence to that effect.

The police do have procedures and do behave much better than the general public.

As also repeated the police has extra security constraints, which must be balanced with any benefits the tracking app bring. Clearly they think that allowing a third party app which goal is real-time tracking, on police phones has more downsides than upsides.

I don't know anything about American police and I don't care. This is not the topic of the discussion, which is about an UK tracking app and UK police forces.

I do think that shooting this advice against installing the app (on police phones) and my comments down is largely being obtuse because it's the police or because they don't want to acknowledge the specificities of police work.

Sadly, they very much are not. I've noticed police seem quite consistently not even wearing face masks when everyone else is supposed to

And we might as well assume the sun rises in the west.

Saturday I saw a hospital worker (role unknown) with his mask in his hand. Not only that, but he was heading into the bathroom--a place you should be extra cautious about.

Other than that I have seen very good compliance by all medically trained people in healthcare facilities, sloppy compliance by those without medical training (receptionists etc.) I rather suspect he was not actually a medical worker despite being in the treatment area.

Coming from the USA perspective, this is absolutely laughable. It is very, very rare that I've seen a police officer in close interaction with anyone don a mask.