Yep. They won't lock down any more strictly, too much fear for the economy. To be fair, I'm talking about essential key workers where I work, but there's no requirement for non-essential businesses to close, only non-essential shops and the hospitality industry. Workplaces are supposed to follow strict rules. Mine is pretty good at that, but I've heard a lot of horror stories about small offices - let alone warehouses, factories and off-grid employment - where social distancing just hasn't crossed their mind at all. It's starting to look more and more like aerosol transmission can't be ignored, though. And workplace Covid-secure rules don't really address aerosol transmission well enough, if at all. There are still too many children in schools, too.
Recent analysis has suggested that the majority of transmission recently has been in supermarkets and schools. I always thought schools drove a lot of the infection rate, I've thought that right from the first wave. They're tightening up on supermarkets, insisting they take more responsibility and not just turn a blind eye to the many claiming a mask exemption on supposed medical grounds. Supermarkets are just too cramped, too busy, and too many people were treating food shopping as a bit of a leisure outing.
Still nobody is sure how much of all this is caused by the new strain of Covid, although the new strain is definitely becoming dominant right across the country. There were a handful of cases recognised in this area a few weeks ago, now they believe it's 65% of cases. Certainly suggests it has an evolutionary advantage! If people infected with the new strain are breathing out much bigger concentrations of the virus, which is what is suspected, it's got to make the likelihood of aerosol transmission higher and maybe raise the risk of surface transmission, just after everyone accepted that wasn't as big a threat as was originally thought.
the good news is that number of new cases peaked two weeks ago, so the death numbers should not be expected to rise much more before they start going down. But this wave is hitting very hard.
